As always, Audrey lived and breathed dance. Now age nineteen, she faced a crossroads in Amsterdam when funding cuts at the Gaskell school necessitated the dancer be removed from the roster. But she remained “eager to become a prima ballerina” and applied to the Marie Rambert School of Ballet in London. An endorsement from Madame Gaskell helped to secure Madame Rambert’s interest, but an audition would be required.
Sonia Gaskell herself spent endless hours preparing Audrey for the audition. “You know,” said Audrey, “I always tell this story when people ask about turning points in my life. This Russian ballet teacher worked and worked with me, preparing me for my audition, going through such paces, training, sweating. And on my last day we went through it all again, and she gave me a big hug and said, ‘Now, you forget everything I told you. From now on it all has to come from inside you.’ And this has got me out of any amount of scrapes. I’ve been constantly in situations in my life and career where I’ve had no technique, but if you just feel enough, you will get away with murder.”
For the first time in nine years Audrey separated from her mother (and her mother’s legal troubles) and traveled to London—the fact that she was the daughter of British citizen Joseph Ruston and therefore British herself made this action possible. It didn’t matter that Ruston had been considered a traitor and was imprisoned during the war. An Englishman was an Englishman, and his daughter was also English.
Audrey passed her audition and began instruction under Marie Rambert in a London still cleaning up from five brutal years of air raids and V1 and V2 attacks. Destroyed blocks and neighborhoods still marred the urban landscape—a constant reminder of where she, and the world, had just been.
According to Hepburn biographer Barry Paris: “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 Vaslav Nijinsky in The Rite of Spring.”
Said Audrey as she was about to begin at the prestigious school, “Suddenly, I faced a problem: I could get no money from home.” Ella’s funds were still tied up in her legal defense, prompting Rambert, an empty nester with two adult daughters living on their own, to become the second ballet mistress to befriend the waif; she invited Audrey to live with her as Ella endured legal scrutiny in Arnhem and The Hague.
Which is not to say that ballet mistress Rambert had mellowed. Audrey said of Rambert that when she “would catch us folding our arms or slouching our shoulders, she’d give us a good rap across the knuckles with a stick.”
In London, a male dancer noticed “this very pretty, strange Dutch girl who suddenly arrived at the Rambert School….” But here and now, Audrey faced a shock. After practicing under Marova and then under Gaskell in a Netherlands where ballet had just begun to take hold, Audrey was in the presence of a “queen hornet” who had trained the founders of the Sadler’s Wells and Royal Ballets. The “strange Dutch girl” took her place at the barre next to “girls who had had five years of Sadler’s Wells teaching, paid for by their families,” said Audrey, “and who had always had good food and bomb shelters.” The Dutch girl had had none of these things. Quite the contrary; she had lost well over a year of instruction due to battles, shelling, malnutrition, and illness. Most horrific of all, in a line of dancers each the ideal height of 160 centimeters, she towered at 170—an inelegant five-foot-seven.
The writing was on the wall; the dancer was devastated. But she remained her mother’s daughter: tough, hungry, and above all, practical. A crowded ballet roster and her own gangly height required a strategy shift, which she made on a dime based on her experience back with Marova designing her own dances. “I wanted very much to become a choreographer,” she said, “and Rambert was known for developing young choreographers. So I wanted to be Margot Fonteyn and a choreographer as well.”
She salved the trauma of her foundering ballet career with a new best friend: food. For many who had endured starvation conditions in the Hunger Winter, the once-normal relationship with food would forever be altered. Taste buds changed, as did appetites. The sensation of being hungry became elusive, and what did it feel like to be “full”? When was enough enough? For some, food that had been deprived for so long now represented security and with so much of it around, those who had once nearly starved couldn’t help themselves. Audrey shared these new challenges with millions of Dutch survivors. She admitted to a reporter in 1959 that after the war she “began to overcompensate and eat everything in sight.”
“I went on an eating binge,” she admitted. “I would eat anything in sight and in any quantity. I’d empty out a jam jar with a spoon.” As a result, she admitted, “I became quite tubby and put on twenty pounds.”
Audrey remained with Rambert because she still loved ballet and couldn’t give it up. At the same time, she said, “I had been told that my height was a handicap in ballet and that I might have to slave for years to achieve only limited success. I couldn’t wait years; I needed money badly…. I chose the stage.”
London was returning to life, literally. With all the servicemen back, there were babies everywhere, it seemed. Bombed-out buildings were being removed brick by brick, some becoming car parks. The new communications medium of television appeared. The rationing of bread, begun in 1946, finally ended in July of 1948 just in time for the Summer Olympic Games, which were held in London despite shortages and rubble. It was a grand place to be, London, and Audrey remained determined to work and prosper. She could only hope that sooner or later her mother would be free of obligations in the Netherlands and join her, and Audrey must be ready for that day.
37
Completely Nuts
“[The war] made me resilient and terribly appreciative for everything good that came afterward,” said Audrey. “I felt enormous respect for food, freedom, for good health and family—for human life.”
“It was a simple deduction that my best way was to take on a job as a dancer while continuing to study ballet. I found that what everybody did in these circumstances was to audition for a job in some London revue. I liked the idea.”
The Hunger Winter survivor continued her on-again, off-again love affair with food. Now it was time for a crash diet in preparation for auditions for a London show, something a girl with a will of iron could manage. “You can’t turn your back … on temptations or worries,” she told a reporter some years later. “You’ve got to face them head-on and reject them.”
Of the actual crash diet that saw a loss of almost thirty pounds in two months, she said she accomplished it “by merely watching my diet and cutting out all starches and sweets.”
As she changed her body, she also adopted a stage name better suited to the country in which she now worked: Audrey Hepburn. There was never a question that she could retain the surname Ruston after her father’s hateful participation in fascist activities and imprisonment through the war. But the Hepburn name had character and history and worked beautifully. Audrey Hepburn it was. In another few years, Ella would file papers in Britain to officially change her name to Ella Hepburn as well.
The revue offering auditions was High Button Shoes, and Audrey, thanks to three years of intense ballet training that had produced athleticism and stamina if not perfect technique, was chosen as one of ten dancers out of the thousand who applied. High Button Shoes, with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Sammy Cahn, and choreography by Jerome Robbins, had been the sensation of Broadway in 1947. Now it would open in London’s West End in December 1948.
“I got my first job as a glorified chorus girl with bits and pieces to do,” said Audrey. “This suited me fine. I was given a chance to express myself on one stage at least, while I didn’t seem to get anywhere as a would-be principal dancer in the ballet.”
The lead dancer of High Button Shoes, Nickolas Dana, ascertained Audrey’s financial situation by her clothing as rehearsals began. He told biographer Barry Paris: “She had one s
kirt, one blouse, one pair of shoes, and a beret, but she had fourteen scarves. What she did with them week by week, you wouldn’t believe. She’d wear the little beret on the back of her head, on one side, on the other side….”
The plot of High Button Shoes concerned two con men and a family in Atlantic City and featured the raucous “Bathing Beauty Ballet” number and hit songs “I Still Get Jealous” and “Papa, Won’t You Dance With Me?” all with Audrey among the troupe of dancers. She had one line in the entire show: “Lou Parker, the star, stood in the middle [of the stage],” said Audrey, “and I went tearing across holding another girl by the hand and said, ‘Have they all gone?’ Believe me, I was nervous every single night. I used to repeat it to myself over and over before going on.”
The bawdy show, loaded with charm and energy, ranged far from Audrey’s comfort zone in the type of short programs she had performed for Winja Marova at the Schouwburg in Arnhem. But she had a dancer’s soul if not training equal to other girls around her. She also had pizazz thanks to that deep performer’s instinct to feel her way through performances. She was a natural chameleon who could give the people in any audience what they wanted. Her style drew the eyes of many, including actor-turned-theatrical-producer Cecil Landreau, who came to see High Button Shoes and thought Audrey perfect for one of the five chorus girls in his new musical revue in development, Sauce Tartare. The show would open in May 1949 and mean a raise in pay for the dancer—all she had to do was leave the show that had been her stepping-stone. And that’s what she did.
Except for a few hops across the North Sea to England in 1947 and 1948, Ella had remained close to home in the Netherlands as the investigation into her wartime activity dragged on. With Audrey away Ella had moved from Amsterdam to Offenberglaan 1 at the northeastern tip of The Hague. In February 1949, finally, it was determined that her sympathies were definitely pro-German into 1942 and her actions may have been suspicious, but insufficient evidence existed to convict her of any crimes against her country other than, perhaps, bad judgment. But according to P.J. de Vries, inspector of police in Arnhem, Mrs. van Heemstra was and always would be “politically unreliable.”
Ella was officially off the hook but now faced the red tape associated with leaving the country to take up residence in London, and as the months passed, Audrey began work in Sauce Tartare, and then in a second, shorter floor show at Ciro’s nightclub, which was then billed as “the famous London rendezvous of smart society.”
The Ciro’s show was also the brainchild of Cecil Landreau. According to Audrey, “He said one day that anyone who’d like to make an extra shilling could be in cabaret. So after Sauce Tartare, at 11:30 at night, I’d be at Ciro’s again at midnight, make up and do two shows. All dancing. I made £11 for the first show and £20 for the second. So I was doing eighteen shows weekly and earning over £150 a week. I was completely nuts.”
She said on another occasion, “I worked like an idiot. It was work, work, work, work…. I did anything to earn a buck so that my mother could come over and join me.” Under this brutal schedule, all traces of baby fat were long gone and her face had developed the sleek patrician look that would, before long, help to make her famous. By now “anything to earn a buck” included continued modeling work for the still camera and occasional bits on television. Among her gigs was a shoot for photographer Angus McBean. Soon Audrey’s face appeared in advertising for the moisturizer Lacto-Calamine.
Finally, Ella shook free of the oppression of her native land and arrived in London determined not to live on her daughter’s income. She tried various positions, as a cook, beautician, and flower saleswoman, before becoming manager of a stately three-story brick apartment building just east of Hyde Park. Her position included a flat for mother and daughter, and just then, according to Hepburn biographer Alexander Walker, Ella began a romance with sixty-one-year-old Dutch business magnate Paul Rijkens, founding chairman of Unilever. Rijkens had spent the war in England with Queen Wilhelmina and possessed the wisdom to stay away from any European investments for his Rotterdam-based company. Instead, he focused on building businesses in the United States and Britain. By war’s end he had bought majority interest in Lipton tea, Birds Eye frozen foods, and Pepsodent toothpaste and sat poised to ride the wave of the baby boom.
According to Walker, Rijkens “now became the Baroness’s benefactor. Audrey was devoted to him; if any man replaced her father at this stage in her life, it was he. He had an apartment in Berkeley Square, in the same part of central London as the Baroness’s residence. Thus, for the first time in years, Audrey felt she had security.”
Not that the dancer would ever dream of taking it easy. She kept earning money at a frantic pace, dancing in another Landreau burlesque show, Sauce Piquante. Ivor Brown of the London Observer was one who took notice of the Sauce Piquante dancer. “I suggest that the names of Joan Heal and Audrey Hepburn will some day be illuminated over theater doors,” he wrote on 30 April 1950.
Life in the footlights kept her striking face, big brown eyes, and shapely legs on display night after night. Dance was getting her places—just not the places she expected to go as a twelve year old dreaming of life in the Royal Ballet. Time and again the sweat and toil of life in the chorus line provided a showcase where her innate charm and unique look could be noticed. Then would come auditions for parts in movies or television.
She would boil it down for the Washington Post in 1985 as, “I remember being very involved with the classical ballet and the movies were really not serious. To earn an extra buck, I did bits in movies but that was to earn an extra buck. That wasn’t going to be my career.” But to earn that buck, she needed some vague notion of moviemaking; she had none. “I didn’t know what a camera was. I didn’t know what was going on. It was still new to me. I had no idea how to play a scene or anything.”
She wasn’t a real actress, but the fates had seemingly decided she must become one. She joined the acting class of sixty-year-old character actor Felix Aylmer, a veteran of British stage and cinema. There, finally, the girl with no background in theater learned some basics of elocution, projection of her voice, and reaction to the dialogue of others—at least enough that she could fake her way through. “He taught me to concentrate intelligently on what I was doing,” she said, “and made me aware that all actors need a ‘method’ of sorts to be even vaguely professional.”
She landed a recurring role in the BBC television production Saturday Night Revue that she recorded around the time Sauce Piquante opened in May 1950. She earned a few lines and close-ups in a scene as a hotel clerk in the feature One Wild Oat for Coronet Films, then two scenes as a cigarette girl in the Alastair Sim comedy, Laughter in Paradise, then a funny short scene as a bought girl with Alec Guinness in The Lavender Hill Mob.
When MGM came to town looking for a fresh face to play Lygia in its latest epic, Quo Vadis, Audrey earned a screen test. “At the time Metro tested me they were forced to test a certain percentage of English actors,” said Audrey. “They had to test so many English girls. I’m sure they intended to use their own [American-based] girls.” She was right—the part went to MGM contract player Deborah Kerr.
It was never the career she wanted; it was the career that came easily to her—she had grown into an exotic face that responded to makeup and lighting. If she gained a few pounds that week, her face looked one way. If she lost a few the next, her face looked a different way. Given her personal history in the war, those dark days when she hated her looks and thought herself too ugly to ever marry, seeing herself as an actress in motion pictures led to lifelong bewilderment.
In 1965 she said, “I can safely say that unlike others I simply stumbled into movies. And from one thing came the other. Suddenly I found myself acting. It’s never been I who said, ‘I can act.’ Instead, mine has been a meek and curious, ‘What is this thing you are giving me now?’ I’ve been offered and given things to do, and in return I’ve given them what I have—which I know I have. Which is a ca
pacity for hard work and a lot of instinct I’ve been born with.”
In 1988 she addressed the subject again: “I didn’t have the drive because I had the great luxury of not needing it. Once I did Roman Holiday the offers came in. It was not in my nature to be terribly ambitious or driven because I didn’t have the confidence to be so. My confidence came and went with each movie; once I’d finished one, I didn’t know if I’d ever work again.”
And once more in 1991: “I never was the ideal performer, because I suffer so terribly from fear.” She analyzed herself and went on. “An actress is not something I ever became. I think actresses are people with a very high level of professional technique. I act now the same way I did forty years ago. By trying to sense, feel. I am never backed up by anything professional. I did no Shakespeare at school, none of that. It’s not like a great musician who has worked at his instrument, none of that. I’ve had to skip all that and do it with feeling.”
Or as Ella phrased it to her daughter during the period when Audrey Hepburn shot to international stardom in 1953 and 1954, “Considering that you have no talent, it’s really extraordinary where you’ve gotten.” Her mother’s attack of friendly fire became a source of pride for Audrey, and a story she repeated often enough that in 1989, news writer Angela Fox Dunn of the Rochester Democrat asked if it were really true.
“She did say that, oh, yes,” recalled Audrey with a chuckle. “She said it in the middle of all the lovely successes I was having. And that’s what I really believe to this day. I’ve always been self-conscious about interviews, about my thinness, my tallness, my unattractiveness. My success—it still bewilders me.”
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