Still, Audrey’s war included running secret messages, helping downed fliers, dancing for the onderduikers, and doing whatever else Dr. Visser ’t Hooft and his fellow physicians needed at the hospital. It also meant taking food to the liberator hidden in the cellar—on penalty of death. She may never have thought so, but Audrey did her part.
Part V:
Toys
26
The Princess
In 1959 world-famous movie star Audrey Hepburn was six years removed from her Best Actress Academy Award for Roman Holiday and five years distant from a Tony Award earned for Ondine on Broadway. She had recently broken her back in a fall from a horse while making the western Unforgiven. She earned half a million a picture these days, and her career survived even poorly received films like War and Peace and Green Mansions—the latter directed by her husband since 1954, actor Mel Ferrer. The world saw the quiet, reserved Hepburn as an oddity. She lacked the curves and overt sex appeal of Marilyn Monroe, now the hottest star in movies. A debate raged as to whether Hepburn was beautiful or ugly, sexy or boyish. With a tall frame and twenty-two-inch waist, Audrey Hepburn had already gained a reputation as a clothes horse and her designer of choice was Hubert de Givenchy, but she didn’t seek glamour or the spotlight. It found her despite serious efforts at avoidance. She longed for a quiet home life, wanted children, and didn’t like to party. She rarely provided juicy quotes for gossip columns. Words often used to describe her personality were “distant” and “aloof.”
Eleanor Harris, a writer and minor celebrity in Hollywood at the time, penned an article for Good Housekeeping about Audrey Hepburn just as prints of her new film, The Nun’s Story, circulated to theaters around the United States. The forty-seven-year-old Harris was known for writing the original story that became the 1948 Cary Grant film Every Girl Should Be Married, as well as a few other film and stage properties. Now, in the summer of 1959, she used her inside-Hollywood connections to put Audrey Hepburn into the crosshairs.
The resulting article accused Hepburn of pretending she was a real-life princess like the one she had played in Roman Holiday. Hepburn was, according to Harris, a synthetic personality adept at portraying a long-suffering soul. She wasn’t really too good to be true; she was just pretending she was, according to the author.
Examples abounded in Harris’s piece. When Audrey convalesced from a broken back, she reclined in a white room with white appointments in a white bed. She wore a white dressing gown and a white ribbon in her hair. The nurse who tended Audrey said, “She refused all narcotics and sedatives, and despite her pain she never once complained. As a matter of fact, I never even saw her become irritated. She seemed more interested in other people’s problems than in her own.”
Another Harris example of Hepburn’s disingenuous self concerned the making of her latest picture: “For the six months of shooting The Nun’s Story,” wrote Harris, “she seemed to be playing the role of the selfless nun whether or not she was near a camera. ‘It’s that princess bit again—be a shining example to the populace,’ comments an acquaintance.” And, according to Harris, at one point Hepburn “was stranded for many hours in the broiling African sun without drinking water. When it arrived, she poured cupfuls for thirsty natives, leaving none for herself.”
A third example of Hepburn’s oddness from Harris: On location in Rome for the same picture, Hepburn developed kidney stones and suffered pain that literally knocked her out of bed. But she refused to bother director Fred Zinnemann and his wife after hours, even though they lodged a phone call away in the same hotel. “This makes it clear that Audrey, having chosen her noble role, plays it to the hilt, as any superb actress should,” wrote Harris’s poison pen. She noted “the intense way she [Hepburn] goes about making everything perfect—from her performances to her household, to her marriage, to her opinion of others, and to her own princess-like view of herself as she thinks others should see her.”
Harris noted with seeming disapproval that Hepburn and husband Mel Ferrer had never owned a home in their five years of marriage, instead renting in a variety of countries. “But I feel at home everywhere, never having had a permanent home in my life,” she quoted Audrey as saying. “And beside, we move our home with us, like snails.”
Harris said that “like an exiled member of royalty, she takes with her, wherever she goes, trunks packed with her own candelabra, flat silver, books, records, pictures.”
Harris also attacked the world-famous waist of Audrey Hepburn. “As with everything else in her life, her elegant, bone-thin figure is the result of harsh discipline. She always eats the same breakfast: two boiled eggs, one piece of seven-grain whole-wheat toast from a health-food store, and three or four cups of coffee laced with hot milk. Her lunch consists of cottage cheese and fruit salad or of yogurt with raw vegetables. For dinner she has meat and several cooked vegetables.”
In the world of Eleanor Harris, there was no room for a “too-good-to-be-true” creature like Audrey Hepburn. But Harris held out hope that someday Hepburn would “prove it by finally revealing herself to be like the rest of the human race, both good and bad.”
How simple for freelance writer Eleanor Harris. Bang out 2,500 words, snag a $500 paycheck, and move on. But for Audrey Hepburn, the sentence was life long, written in blood, half British and half Frisian. The too-good personality had been pounded into her, not only by Mother but by merciless dance instructors, by ruthless German authorities, and by bombs manufactured in three countries. The mastery of self had been her means of survival in times that were blacker than black, when people she knew were dragged off, never to return, and when the food ran out and there was next to nothing to eat for weeks and months on end. No, there was never anyone quite like Audrey Hepburn, and there’s no way of understating how wrong Harris had gotten her story. In fact, to meet Hepburn was to be in the presence of honesty, integrity, and genuineness. To see what remained after the war. All that was forged in the war. She was a woman who had survived. Yes, she carried secrets, and their burden was great. If a reporter strayed too close to any of these secrets, she would say, “I don’t want to talk about that.” But she would never dream of lying to you about anything. She had been brought up better than that.
Just fifteen years earlier she had ridden out the battle for “a bridge too far” and helped civilian victims deal with its aftermath. She would never go into detail about what she had seen—how much blood she had washed off her hands, how many souls in misery she had comforted; these were among the things she didn’t want to talk about. While Eleanor Harris lived in the safety of the United States and wrote screenplays of adventure, the Dutch girl was experiencing adventures that were far too real. After the death of the baroness, Audrey opened up about the trials of being her mother’s daughter: “I was given an outlook on life by my mother, a lady of very strict Victorian standards,” said Hepburn. “It was frowned upon to bother others with your feelings. It was frowned upon not to think of others first. It was frowned upon not to be disciplined.”
In October 1944 she brought fifteen years of her mother’s training to bear in the hospital of Velp as she started down a path that would have at its end, forty-four years later, the role of UNICEF ambassador.
27
Hunters
“Our presence there [in Velp] was tolerated by the Germans, but just barely so,” said Audrey of the tenuous weeks after the battle for Arnhem. It was a time when her village maintained its status as the most important spot to the Nazis in the whole of the Netherlands. Seyss-Inquart and Rauter, the ruling administration, moved back into their villas. The Dutch SS contingent, minus all their records lost in the panic-burning of the Hotel Naeff, returned as well.
British prisoners were processed through Velp and marched to prison camps in the east, and fresh German troops passed through on their way to Arnhem. Morning and evening, steady streams of tanks, half-tracks, and trucks loaded with soldiers headed west down the van Heemstras’ street and main street as well,
then on to Arnhem to reinforce the troops there.
The steady flow of military vehicles on Velp’s thoroughfares quickly drew attention from the “hunters,” Allied fighter aircraft that were the dread of both the German army and Dutch civilians. Photographs by reconnaissance aircraft noticed the situation first, then free-wheeling British fighter planes began patrols that sought targets of opportunity. The city of Arnhem and village of Oosterbeek might have been the prizes earned by Model and Bittrich, but the skies over all of Gelderland were, with the Luftwaffe now crippled by Allied bombing and fighter support, every inch British. The RAF Second Tactical Air Force, or 2nd TAF, had taken over the former Luftwaffe airfield at Le Culot near present-day Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, putting Allied aircraft just 100 air miles south-southwest of Arnhem and Velp.
All Velpenaren, including Audrey, learned fast lessons regarding the art of aerial warfare as practiced by the Allies in the days after Germany’s victory at Arnhem. “I had gone into the village to do something,” said Audrey. “I don’t know, shop for my mother or whatever, and all of a sudden there was a German convoy going through the village. And everybody along the road sort of stopped. And then British Spitfires suddenly swooped down going dit-dit-dit-dit-dit, and I was pushed under a tank, which saved me—the German tank.” It was the first time she had been in the direct line of hostile bullets, in this case fired by the Spitfire’s Browning machine guns.
The sudden formations of fighters patrolling the length of the vital road from Arnhem through Velp and east to Germany caused the Reich’s motorized columns to seek shelter during the daylight hours for fear of drawing a rocket attack. These hunters, as both the Dutch and Germans referred to them, would swoop out of nowhere, sometimes with a moment’s warning from the air-raid siren, sometimes not. But German soldiers kept their heads on swivels to see what might be coming from above.
Armored vehicles were parked under the canopy of the beech trees along Rozendaalselaan every day and, invariably, in front of the Beukenhof. Neighbor boy Dick Mantel reported that the van Heemstras’ residence was usually buttoned up tight at this point in the war, with very little coming or going from the occupants. But Audrey continued to help Dr. Visser ’t Hooft tend the sick and wounded as a result of the battle.
“My father’s time was completely taken up caring for refugees and wounded people pouring in from all sides to Velp,” said his daughter Clan. “He was, apart from working at the hospital, a great deal of the day visiting private homes where refugees and sick people needed care. He was an overall doctor, pulling teeth, doing small operations like stitching wounds or removing shell splinters, delivering babies, and so on.”
Through it all, Audrey could hear Allied heavy bombers flying over, the Americans by day and the British by night. As she had all year, on clear days she could take heart by looking up during her walk to work or out the hospital window at the dots in the sky four miles straight up and marvel at their brilliant white contrails. The German flak guns still blazed, but the bombers still flew, never ceasing their attacks.
On cloudy days the bombers couldn’t be seen, but they always could be heard, and then, a while after they had passed overhead, the detonation of bombs rumbled in the east on the far side of the German border fifty, seventy-five, or even a hundred miles away. And on every surface inside every home grew a gritty layer of residue from the war. Bits of gunpowder, dust and fragments from flak bursts, ash from homes and buildings burned out in Arnhem—it all rained down on Velp and stayed there, with no spare water to clean anything. Not that it mattered, because even if the ever-tidy Dutch wiped and swept up the grit, which they did constantly, the war would just rain down again the next day, and the next.
Reminders of the 4 October deadline for refugees to depart from Velp came on the second of the month and again on the third. Announcements were posted on message boards and nailed to trees. Those poor souls taken in by the van Heemstras dutifully packed up and prepared to go.
“It was unspeakably hard to turn away family and friends into the cold night,” said Audrey of that 4 October. “Even my brother, who was hiding there, had to leave.”
The fourth was a Wednesday, and Audrey was at work in the Ziekenhuis, which the Germans had labeled “a center of illegal action.” They knew it was Resistance headquarters in the village, but the facility was so well run that it couldn’t be proven. Said Velp historian Gety Hengeveld-de Jong of the ever more sophisticated system of smuggling onderduikers through the village, “[Chief of Staff] Dr. van der Willigen and [head nurse] Sister van Zwol worked to assist ‘illegal immigrants.’ For example, a flight line for Jews, co-organized by the later publisher Geert Lubberhuizen, ran from Amsterdam and Utrecht via the Velp hospital to the ‘hidden village’ in the woods near Vierhouten; Velpsche Jew Mrs. Saartje Pik and husband spent the war in hiding in the hospital; and escaped French prisoners of war were temporarily taken care of and possibly medically cared for there.” And of course the boys in white remained on the premises. All these activities went on in the building where Audrey assisted Dr. Visser ’t Hooft.
It was on this Wednesday, deadline day for the refugees to vacate, that disaster struck at the heart of Velp. It began with the air-raid siren announcing the approach of a formation of British twin-engine Mosquito fighter-bombers following the Velperweg up from Arnhem. The eyes of the lead pilot must have grown wide at the sight of three Tiger tanks lumbering east up Hoofdstraat toward Germany in broad daylight. They were the Reich’s finest, notorious both for their lethal bite and utter slowness. The “hunters” snapped into a dive after their prey.
On Hoofdstraat at the home of radiologist Dr. Bernhard van Griethuysen, no one even noticed the Tigers clanking past because tank activity was common on main street—except these tanks were careless enough to be moving during the day. Instead, all eyes were on Corrie van Griethuysen, who had just returned from the hairdresser with her two sons, Joost and Ben, in tow. The boys began playing with neighbor Annemarth Visser ’t Hooft and other children in the garden.
Jan van Hensbergen, an accountant in Arnhem until the battle, sat reading at home on Audrey’s street when the air-raid siren began to wail. The noise became deafening in seconds as the planes thundered over and plates flew from the cupboard in all directions. Van Hensbergen grabbed his dog in one arm and the child he was babysitting in the other and dove to the floor as bullets stitched the walls over their prone bodies. Rockets hit the house next door and shrapnel ripped through the walls. The Mosquitoes zipped over the van Heemstras’ street still firing wing guns and sets of rockets. The next pair of rockets pierced the wall of the stately brick post office and exploded inside.
Up the main street, Corrie van Griethuysen had time only to turn and see a plane screaming toward her firing rockets. The van Griethuysens’ home was located at a jog in Hoofdstraat. The road jogged to the left and the tanks jogged with it. The planes kept firing in a straight line.
Corrie shoved Joost, Ben, and Annemarth inside the glass patio door of their home as rockets exploded at intervals of fifty yards. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Closer and closer and into the Griethuysen garden hit the rockets. A sixty-pound warhead exploded a few yards from the group of frightened civilians. Windows were shattered as far away as the Ziekenhuis.
When the smoke cleared, Corrie van Griethuysen, mother of Joost and Ben, lay dead. “She took the shock and we were safe,” said Annemarth. Six refugees from Arnhem sprawled in death nearby. The wounded children were whisked away from the scene. All told, seventeen civilians died and forty were wounded in the day’s air attack on those three tanks.
Craters stepped their way along Velp’s busiest street and a geyser shot water skyward from one of the few pipes in the village that was still operational—connected to a German facility no doubt. Jan van Hensbergen hurried up from his damaged home to gather information for a report to the Resistance. He wrote, “According to our observation, no tanks were hit.”
Allied bombs had again made in
nocent Velpenaren pay. It was always the Dutch civilians who suffered and mourned while the fighter planes simply flew away, their pilots shielded from the moral ramifications of killing civilians. “You are not in immediate contact with the damage you’ve created on the ground with your rockets or whatever it was—your guns,” said RAF fighter-pilot Sir Kenneth Adam, “because you’re flying over at 500 miles per hour and you’re not like when you are in an infantry unit attack. You see tanks being destroyed and you attack to concentrations, but you are still detached from what is happening on the ground.”
In the wake of the British Mosquitoes, back in Velp Audrey saw wounded received at the hospital. For Dr. Visser ’t Hooft and his fifteen-year-old helper, the attack that killed Corrie van Griethuysen was personal because of the close relationships among the doctors of Velp, like family. With great care little Ben was brought in; he had been too near the blast that killed his mother. He was deafened in one ear and suffered other injuries, and yet didn’t know his mother was gone. He was told she was in the hospital and would be back in a few weeks. For Ben, the days passed with agonizing slowness, and as each went by he anticipated her return. Then with no mother in sight after what must surely have been more than three weeks, he asked his older sister what was going on.
“She told me the truth that my mother was already buried and not living anymore,” said Ben. “And then I went to the hospital and there Audrey Hepburn met me and took me in her arms to calm me. I remember looking into her big, wide eyes.” He would never forget the compassion in Audrey’s face as this gentle teenager who had always loved children now sought to comfort little Ben.
Dutch Girl Page 21