Dutch Girl

by Robert Matzen

  38

  Peace

  Audrey said late in 1964, just as My Fair Lady premiered, “If I have become a movie star, it’s despite my childhood, not because of it. I grew up in Holland under the Nazi occupation and this was my world from my eleventh to my sixteenth birthday.”

  Audrey expressed the idea on many occasions in many different ways that experiences before and during the war affected her psychology; war made her introverted, but also tough and disciplined. It sharpened instincts that would form the foundation of her acting and philanthropic careers.

  War also altered her physiology, and her “thinness” as the Hollywood years went by would become a much-whispered-about topic for friends and fans alike. In an October 1951 newspaper article about the new star of Gigi, reporter Norton Mockridge of the New York World Telegram said, “Miss Hepburn, who never drinks but smokes a little, is always hungry. And after being starved for years for a taste of fresh meat, she eats almost nothing else over here.

  “‘Look,’ she’ll say to a waitress, ‘The tenderloin steak, please, but very rare. You know what I mean? Raw rare. With the blood in it. Dripping. Very rare. Almost raw.’”

  At this point in her life she still channeled Dr. van der Willigen of the Ziekenhuis in Velp, the doctor who had seen her for edema near the end of the war and prescribed a pound of red meat a day.

  In an 11 September 1953 sit-down interview with Hedda Hopper in Hollywood, she admitted, “I’ve put on a little weight—on my holiday in England. When I’m not working I put on weight.”

  By the end of the 1950s, her regimen would be very different—boiled eggs, wheat bread from a health food store, fruits, vegetables, and yogurt. This coincided with the beginning of the “bone-thin” period that would last for the remainder of her life. By the 1980s she was defending her lack of heft in interviews and saying, “I eat everything I want,” which included at this time of her life lots of pasta. She claimed she lost her appetite in time of stress, and many things did indeed make her nervous. When nervous she didn’t eat; she smoked somewhere between six and sixty cigarettes a day—official and unofficial estimates varied by a wide margin.

  In 1944 into ’45, an experimental program in the United States asked for volunteers to simulate the Hunger Winter of the Netherlands. The idea of the Minnesota Experiment was to understand what famine-plagued Dutch civilians would need after the war to regain their health. The results were troubling as they showed the dire psychological consequences of long-interrupted nutrition. The relationship of humans to food, once automatic, became after some months a love-hate experience for the volunteers that dominated and in some ways engineered every waking thought. Personalities changed, and what once was normal never quite returned to normal again.

  Audrey was one of millions of Dutch males and females to survive the Hunger Winter. “I had gone through the war years deprived of food, dollars, books, music, and clothing—all the ordinary needs,” she said. “Now I began to overcompensate by eating everything in sight, particularly chocolates. I became as swollen, and as unattractive, as a balloon…. My mother and I had seen too many unhappy things in Holland….”

  She did survive Holland, and even thrived afterward; in the long term, that last long, cold winter of the war may have caused irreparable damage to her digestive system. And yet it was her system, and she could clam up about anything she considered off-limits. Her rule: Keep the interview to under thirty minutes because “after that, the questions become personal,” and personal was not okay.

  As a young star of twenty-six, she spoke defiantly of her label as “aloof” for not answering some reporters’ questions. “People who would rob you of your dearest possession—your privacy—aren’t worth having as friends,” she told Cosmopolitan writer Martin Abramson. “I’m a person who needs time to be alone—time to refuel. And I don’t like to talk about my personal life, because I feel each individual has the right to keep some things to himself.”

  Kirtley Baskette, a veteran of Gable and Lombard and one of the first Hollywood writers to interview Audrey in 1953, nailed her right off the bat: “She takes you in but holds you off,” he reported. “The Dutch treat with the English accent talks well but tells nothing. If you ask a personal question she smiles sweetly and is as silent as the sphinx.”

  Thirty-five years later she hadn’t changed a bit: “I am a very reserved person. When I did Gigi and Roman Holiday, I was twenty-four with the mentality of a twelve year old. I was very green and naive, not a bit worldly.”

  She remained a little girl in some ways who had never gotten past the abandonment by her father. But she was a survivor, and in that respect very much like Joseph Ruston, who was arrested in June 1940 as “an associate of foreign fascists” and spent the duration of the war in British prisons. He wasn’t released until April 1945, at which point he headed for Ireland because of its neutrality during the war. He believed that there he would not be judged for his beliefs or his actions, and he was right. Ireland became home.

  Time passed. He got a job and married a much younger woman. He didn’t make an attempt to contact his daughter after the war. Despite even this slight, as her star ascended in 1951, Audrey nurtured her connection to this man. Or, rather, she held close the pain of the severed connection. It stayed with her every moment through every career advancement. Magazines and newspapers mentioned Audrey Hepburn’s mysterious father the fascist, and she never denied what he had been. She simply didn’t address it.

  The war, however, had a way of jumping out of the shadows at the most unexpected moments and oppressing Audrey Hepburn. She couldn’t predict when it would happen, but it kept happening and always would. It happened during the screen test for Roman Holiday, shot at the Pinewood Studios in London on 18 September 1951. Paramount thought this unknown English/Dutch girl so fresh and unique for the part of Princess Ann that they tried to ensure the success of her test by handing it to British director Thorold Dickinson, who had just directed Audrey’s major supporting role in the 1951 thriller, Secret People. Plus, Audrey’s audition consisted of scenes from the Roman Holiday script with two actors whom she already knew and had worked with—another way to make her feel comfortable.

  “Paramount also wanted to see what Audrey was actually like not acting a part, so I did an [on-camera] interview with her,” said Dickinson.

  In that piece of film, Audrey first appears with hands in pockets standing nervously on a stage and appearing very thin. Dickinson, who is heard off-camera, orders her to remove her hands from her pockets and move to a chair and sit down for a close-up. He then begins an informal interview, asking, “Seriously, Audrey, tell us about the war. You spent the whole war in Arnhem. Was it pretty awful?”

  She had been smiling, feeling at home with this director, but the question rocked her and she tensed. Her face froze and the smile along with it. “Yes,” she managed. “It was very bad.”

  “Did you entertain the people there?” he asked. “Is that how you began?” These were just general questions to assess the quality of her face and voice and reactions on camera; Dickinson had no idea how loaded this particular question was. Yes, of course that’s how she began, in July 1941, dancing publicly at the Wehrmachtheim for an audience of German soldiers in an Arnhem under Nazi occupation. Then five months later she appeared onstage with Ella, Alex, and Ian for the pro-Nazi Mozart celebration. It was the beginning of several public performances in wartime.

  Sitting there looking at Dickinson, she thought quickly and with the considerable control of a survivor. She said, “No, not quite how I began. I went to ballet school once I knew I was settled there for quite a while [in Arnhem]. I didn’t know how long the war was going to last so I went to a ballet school and learned to dance.” She paused, then said, “And in about,” another pause, and she said slowly, “…1944, about a year before the end of the war, I was quite capable of performing, and it was a sort of…some way in which I could …,” long pause, “… make some sort of contribution
. I did give some performances to collect money for the Underground, which always needed money.”

  She didn’t lie; she was careful about that. She simply sliced three years out of her own résumé—and how that must have hurt because they were the dancing years, which filled her with pride.

  Dickinson said later, “We loaded a thousand feet of film into a camera and every foot of it went on this conversation. She talked about her experiences in the war, the Allied raid on Arnhem, and hiding out in a cellar. A deeply moving thing.”

  For Audrey, Dickinson’s question represented more than a screen test; it was a test of her will to succeed because whether she knew it or not, and likely she did, a publicity storm lay just over the horizon. She had appeared in bit parts in 1950, and already in this year of 1951 she had completed important roles in Secret People and the comedy Monte Carlo Baby. And that role had changed her life when playwright Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, author of Gigi, spotted Audrey as she worked on location in the Monte Carlo Hotel and declared her perfect to portray Gigi in the soon-to-open Broadway production.

  The day of the Roman Holiday test, Audrey was planning her first trip to the United States to begin Gigi rehearsals. The surviving film of this test shows the extent to which Ella and Audrey had already worked out what she could and could not say about her life during the war years. Yes, Audrey could talk about the zwarte avonden and dancing to raise money for the Resistance. Yes, she could talk about delivering the Resistance newspaper Oranjekrant, helping a downed flier, and escaping from a German press gang. She could certainly discuss the famine, her illnesses, and the deaths of her uncle and cousin. But she must never, ever talk about her debut at the Wehrmachtheim or the Ella-directed Mozart celebration of 1941. Audrey also must never discuss her performances at the Schouwburg of 1942 through ’44—even though the dancer held these performances so close to her heart; they were the greatest accomplishments of her life. They always would be. But the post-war world was black and white due to Nazi atrocities. You were either for or against the Nazis. There were no shades of gray, and the post-war public would not understand how Audrey could have danced before audiences that included the German military. It didn’t matter that Audrey had been a twelve year old and then a teenager who despised the Nazis and all they represented. Nor did her need for self-expression matter. It was simply too much of a risk for Audrey’s career.

  Ella and Audrey had been a team since 1939. Yes, Ella had strayed. She had been foolish in the ’30s, but she had also seen things more clearly and corrected her course. Now it became imperative as her daughter sailed toward stardom that Ella be seen as a Dutch patriot in the war. As luck would have it, she had a cousin, Ernestine Theodora Johanna, Baroness van Heemstra, who had indeed worked heroically throughout the course of the war on behalf of the Resistance; she even managed to survive clashes with the Gestapo. Ella never claimed to have done any of the things that cousin Ernestine had done, but anyone from the always-in-a-hurry British or American press wanting to check about a prominent Baroness van Heemstra in the Netherlands who had worked for the Resistance; well, there she was, easily documented.

  When Audrey arrived in New York City later in September 1951, Ella didn’t accompany her. In fact, the baroness failed to gain entry into the United States because of the paperwork attached to her name and the murky legal status of this woman who not only had once described herself as a fascist but also had earned a rating of “unreliable” by Dutch police after the war. So Audrey ventured into the concrete jungle on her own and placed herself in the hands of two veteran press agents attached to Richard Miller’s production of Gigi.

  Richard Maney had been handling flak for Broadway shows since the Roaring Twenties. The other publicist on the case, Frank Goodman, was the son of Austrian immigrants who had cut his teeth in Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater.

  Maney found Hepburn “so lovely and refreshing, so coltish and eager, that she enchanted critics.” Even better from his perspective, “She had an exciting background and an exotic origin. Daughter of an Irish father and a Dutch mother, throughout World War II she had lived in Arnhem, Holland, under the Nazis. Often she went hungry. Her male relatives were dragged off to labor camps. When she danced, it was to raise funds for the Dutch Underground. All this made copy.”

  Maney and Goodman knew just how to spin Audrey’s war stories to maximum benefit. Because Ella had already helped her daughter clean up the record, and because Audrey had spent her life as a private, introverted person, it came natural to her to keep the record straight. Publicity surrounding Gigi would serve as precedent that followed Audrey to Roman Holiday and then Ondine on Broadway and on through her career in the 1950s and ’60s. False trails about where and when she performed during the war would be laid here for all Hepburn biographers to contend with, especially in the spate of books that appeared after the actress’s death in 1993.

  But Audrey quickly became adept at throwing writers off the scent as well. When she sat down with famed columnist Hedda Hopper for an interview in Los Angeles on 11 September 1953, one of Hedda’s first questions was, “All right, now tell me all about yourself.”

  Audrey smiled her charming smile and replied, “There’s so little to tell.” Her eyes fixed on a framed TIME magazine cover of Hedda on the far wall and Audrey exclaimed, “Isn’t that wonderful. Look at that!” The notoriously vain Hopper, a former actress, took the bait hook, line, and sinker. The survivor had once again survived and avoided any pointed questions about the past. She steered the remaining interview with deftness, using gentle charm, a process she would repeat in the months and years to come. Before long she earned the power to turn down interviews, or grant them only to trusted writers. Her instincts regarding the press were as unerring as those that allowed her to choreograph and to act.

  Another survivor in the family, Ella, Baroness van Heemstra, finally entered the United States with great fanfare in December 1953 after Audrey had wrapped production of Sabrina for Paramount Studios. Daughter was there to welcome mother with a bouquet of signature Dutch tulips and a warm for-cameras-only embrace. Why did it take so long for Ella to make it across the border? And who was it that finally broke the logjam? Circumstantial evidence points to Paramount Pictures, which had a long-standing friendly relationship with FBI head J. Edgar Hoover.

  Once Ella gained entry into the United States, she came and went freely, so no status of “unreliable” had followed her from Europe. Her arrival signaled the end of freedom for Audrey, who, during the time away from her mother, had made and broken an engagement to young English businessman James Hanson, fallen in love with her hell-raising co-star William Holden during production of Sabrina, and then quickly settled down with American actor Mel Ferrer, a man eleven years her senior and the new father figure in her life. Ferrer had worked his way up the ladder to almost-A status, with his most recent success the role as villainous Marquis de Maynes in MGM’s swashbuckling spectacle, Scaramouche. His career would stall after that. He kept working through the 1950s with big roles in small pictures and supporting roles in big ones, while also earning descriptors around town that included “ambitious” and “fussy” and “high-strung.” And where Audrey was concerned, he earned the name “Svengali,” because he became her de facto manager and took over her career.

  Because Audrey was beautiful, charming, and mysterious (in short, she had it all), the most-asked question in Hollywood became, “What does she see in him?” The answer for anyone who knew the lonely Dutch girl who had survived World War II was simple: She craved affection, and Mel made Audrey the center of his universe. And that’s what mattered to her. For the next dozen years, the prime of Audrey Hepburn’s career as a leading lady, Ferrer would battle Ella for leverage over the affections of the woman caught in the middle.

  And what a career it was. Audrey Hepburn became a screen legend even though the actress starred in only nineteen feature motion pictures for Hollywood studios. She followed up her Academy Award win as Best Actress f
or Roman Holiday with four more Best Actress Oscar nominations, for Sabrina in 1954, The Nun’s Story in 1959, Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961, and Wait Until Dark in 1967. Her instincts as an actress remained sharp until the end, despite the ongoing terror she faced at any performance that didn’t involve dance. She always considered herself a dancer at heart, and specifically because she wasn’t an actress, the desire to accept film roles had gone away by the mid-1960s. The son she finally had with Mel Ferrer in 1960 after four miscarriages, Sean Ferrer, had become the most important thing to her. Above all she wanted to give Sean the sort of stable life she had never been able to experience after the abandonment of her father.

  Her marriage to Mel fell apart and they separated in 1967. A year later they were divorced at about the time she met Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, who was fussy Mel Ferrer’s antithesis. Audrey found the nine-years-younger Dotti not only handsome and charming, but “such an enthusiastic, cheerful person.” Dotti represented a fresh start, and they married in January 1969. Soon thereafter she became pregnant—just in time to learn of her new husband’s roving eye. Son Luca was born in February 1970, an event that sealed Audrey’s retirement from the screen. “I am totally crazy about my sons,” she enthused. She said she had done nothing but work, and work hard, from the time she had begun dancing under Marova in Arnhem at age twelve straight through the completion of filming for Wait Until Dark at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank. After twenty-seven years, she wanted only to raise the children she had dreamed of having all her life. As she stated flatly, “I have absolutely no desire to work.”

  She just wanted to live quietly in Italy as Mrs. Andrea Dotti. “I’m a Roman housewife, just as I want to be,” she told the press. She expressed gratitude that she was able to be what she wanted in a modern world that bore no resemblance to the Nazi-occupied Velp of 1944, a time of privation, and “that my child can eat three meals a day and be free and with no danger of somebody banging on the door.” She said she had finally learned to accept that “I’m not going to be taken away, or my family taken away, as were millions of others who once lived around us.”