by Barry Paris
He would soon be called to a more exotic locale but first attended to the matrimonial disposition of his nineteen-year-old Ella. She was married in Arnhem on March 11, 1920, to Hendrik Gustaaf Adolf Quarles van Ufford, Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau. A former lieutenant in the Queen’s equerry, he was now an oil executive of Bataafsche Petroleum (later Dutch Shell), newly assigned to the Netherlands East Indies. He took his bride to Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital) where, precisely nine months after the wedding, their son Alexander was born.
The Dutch empire was far-flung, and Ella’s father now headed for its most remote outpost: In 1921, he was appointed Governor of Surinam (Dutch Guiana) on the northeast coast of South America. It was a territory roughly the size of Georgia, running from the Caribbean seaboard to Brazil, received in a 1667 trade with Britain in exchange for New Amsterdam—the present state and city of New York. It seemed like a good deal at the time.
Nearly half the colony’s population of 300,000 lived in Paramaribo, the capital. In the colorful Asian market area near the waterfront were several Hindu temples and the Caribbean’s largest mosque, peacefully located next to a synagogue. All in all, Paramaribo was an ecumenical city, unmistakably Dutch in character despite its bizarre population mix.b The relative lack of racial tensions was due largely to the tradition of Dutch tolerance: Surinamese knew how to get along with one another.
Paramaribo boasted many beautiful eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial buildings in the Dutch neo-Norman style. Not least of them was the Governor’s Mansion, situated on a plaza with the impossible Dutch name of Onafhankelijkheidsplein. As Baroness Elbrig was often ill, her seventeen-year-old daughter Jacqueline took her place as hostess, serving in that role for the length of her father’s administration. In the future, she would become lady-in-waiting to Princess (later Queen) Juliana; for now, Surinam would provide her with a perfect—and perfectly beautiful—training ground. The official residence, surrounded by orchids that grew twelve feet tall, greatly impressed the van Heemstras from the moment they laid eyes on it.
The Surinamese, in turn, were impressed with Baron van Heemstra. He was the first governor to travel deep into the interior, where white Europeans seldom penetrated. His purpose was business, not pleasure: He was scouting new ways to exploit the country’s extraordinary natural resources, including its huge deposits of bauxite. Soon, Surinam’s bauxite/aluminum industry would account for 72 percent of its exports.
The atmosphere of Paramaribo was charmed. Among its customs were birdsong competitions in the public parks. People routinely carried their pet songbirds in cages when out for a stroll, and even to work. Life was good, and so was the cuisine—as exotic as Surinam’s ethnic makeup—featuring pom, a puree of cassava, and peanut soup with plantain dumplings. The climate was moist but not terribly hot, thanks to the northeast trade winds year round. It was truly, in many ways, a tropical paradise.
But there was trouble in another paradise, halfway around the globe in Batavia, where Ella’s marriage was not going well. The constant quarrels between her and Quarles van Ufford ended in 1925, a year after their second son Ian was born, when they were divorced in the Netherlands East Indies. Divorce was quite rare for an aristocratic Dutchwoman of that time, said a friend, “but she preferred that to taking a lover, like most.”7 Ella was a strong-willed, energetic woman who loved the good life and had a fatal weakness for good-looking men. She took herself and the boys to join her family in the colonial splendor of Paramaribo—but not for long. For Ella, unlike sister Jacqueline, the novelty of Surinam wore off in less than a year, and after returning briefly to Arnhem, she went back to Indonesia.
Her real agenda was to renew and pursue her relationship with an Anglo-Irish businessman, Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, whom she had met there earlier. He, too, had recently been divorced—in San Francisco, of all places. In Ella’s set, marriages and divorces were more easily conducted in exotic locales: On September 7, 1926, she and Joe were wed in Batavia.
Ruston was born in 1889 in Slovakia, where his British father had business.
His claims to have studied at Cambridge and served in the British Army during World War I are unverified, but after the war he did join the diplomatic service and was assigned to the Dutch East Indies as vice-consul at Semarang, a town between Batavia and Surabaja. He later gave that up for a job with the Batavia arbitrage house of Maclaine Watson & Company, which handled trading in East Indian tin.
The allure of Java did not include its oppressive heat or its limited social excitement, and the couple soon opted for Europe again. But Ruston’s transfer to Maclaine Watson’s London headquarters lasted only for a year. Always restless, he next joined an Anglo-French credit society dealing in home loans and the like. That company armed him with the title of vice president and deputy administrator and sent him to open a new branch office in Belgium, where he, Ella and the two boys settled down in the Ixelles district of Brussels.
Half a century later, most chroniclers would characterize Audrey Hepburn’s father as a “banker” who was employed in the Bank of England’s Brussels branch and who, after marrying Ella, handled the van Heemstra family’s properties and finances. Late in life, Audrey bluntly denied it: “They speak of my father having been a banker, which he wasn’t at all. He never really held down a job.”8
The Bank of England was an exchequer or treasury, not a conventional bank, and in fact had no foreign branch in Brussels or anywhere else. Ruston’s initial interest in Ella was enhanced by his incorrect assumption that her family had vast wealth, but he was sadly if not bitterly disabused of that notion early on.
The term “international banker” described him less well than “international adventurer.” The term “pregnant” now described his wife.
AUDREY KATHLEEN VAN HEEMSTRA RUSTON was born in Brussels on May 4, 1929. “Audrey” was a feminine form of “Andrew,” which was to have been her name if she’d been a boy. Her birth certificate omits the hyphenated “Hepburn” before Ruston; Ella allegedly added it later to spiff up her own and her daughter’s future calling card. According to biographer Warren Harris, it was the only aristocratic name Ella could find in Ruston’s family tree—the surname of his grandmother, who was descended from James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. Since the baby’s father and Dutch mother were both British citizens in the eyes of the law, the new baby was likewise certified by the British consulate in Brussels.
“If I were to write a book about myself,” Audrey once told her son Sean, “it would start like this: I was born on May 4, 1929, and I died three weeks later.” At twenty-one days of age, she contracted such a terrible case of whooping cough that her heart stopped. Ella, who was a rather strict Christian Scientist and had not called a doctor, revived her by spanking. “There was no giving up on this baby,” said Sean. “I think that had an effect on her whole life, [as if she’d been given] a second chance.”9
Her early years were chaotic, with constant traveling back and forth between London and Brussels, Arnhem and The Hague. Alexander and Ian stayed often in those days with Ella’s parents and saw little of stepfather Hepburn-Ruston. Ella was as restless as her husband and, when Audrey was a toddler of two, insisted on moving the family from Brussels to a small estate called Castel Sainte-Cecile in the nearby village of Linkebeek.
Baron van Heemstra had by then resigned as Governor of Surinam and returned to live with his daughter Mies and her husband, Count Otto van Limburg Stirum, at Zijpendaal Castle, where Audrey often visited and roamed the gorgeous grounds. But, by and large, she did not recall her early childhood fondly. She was a puny, introverted little girl who had trouble making friends and preferred the tomboyish companionship of her much older half-brothers. She cared much less for dolls, which “never seemed real to me,” she said, than for animals.
Her happiest moments by far were in the country. “I had a passion for the outdoors, for trees, for birds and flowers,” she said—and for Rudy
ard Kipling, inspired by brother Alexander, “the original bookworm.... When we were children he was devoted to Kipling [and] I read all Kipling’s books because I wanted to be like him. I followed everything else he read, too. Before I was thirteen I had read nearly every book by Edgar Wallace and Edward Phillips Oppenheim, who wrote a long series of romantic mysteries about secret international documents, shifty diplomats and seductive adventuresses.... To me as a girl they had far more appeal than books like Topsy Goes to School. ”10
Reading became a lifeline for her. She spoke of The Secret Garden as one of her favorite books and of the fact that, at the age of nine, her mother gave her a copy of Heidi just before they embarked on a train trip from Holland to Italy. She started it instantly and, by the time she finished, they were in Italy without her having seen a glimpse of Switzerland.11
Ian was also a voracious reader, and also close to his little sister. “We were very naughty,” he said. “We did a lot of tree climbing.” Ella would reprimand sharply and “threaten to disown me,” Audrey recalled:My mother was not a very affectionate person. She was a fabulous mother, but she had a Victorian upbringing of great discipline, of great ethics. She was very strict, very demanding of her children. She had a lot of love within her, but she was not always able to show it. I went searching all over the place to find somebody who would cuddle me, and I found it, in my aunts and nannies.12
Several of her aunts encouraged Audrey to begin piano lessons, which she did. But there would be no escaping her mother’s overbearing presence. Robert Wolders, the soft-spoken Dutchman with whom Audrey spent the last dozen years of her life, knew Ella well as “a superior woman, very humorous, extremely well read and well educated—but critical of everyone, including Audrey. Biased, intolerant.”13
Audrey’s childhood was fairly cloistered and indeed full of nannies and private tutors. Though never wanting for a thing, she was keenly aware of the tension between her parents, who fought incessantly over money and other matters. She became increasingly withdrawn and hypersensitive, often seeking refuge in the fields of her family’s estates. Hiding and eating became preoccupations: “It was either chocolates, bread or my nails.”
Her father’s work took him abroad a great deal, and only when he was away did the child seem to find moments of peace. But when he returned, the bickering resumed, and so did Audrey’s introversion. To draw her out, her mother decided to try the “shock” treatment: She sent Audrey, at age five, to a boarding school in England.
At first, “I was terrified about being away from home,” said Hepburn in adulthood. She was teased for being shy and plump, unlike her hockey-playing peers, and for her imperfect English. She missed her mother terribly. Her father, nearby in London, made little effort to see her. Even so, she concluded stoically, “it turned out to be a good lesson in independence.”14
The school was run by the six unmarried Rigden sisters in Elham, Kent. To immerse the girl further in English customs and language, Ella arranged for her to spend holidays with a coal miner’s family in the country, where she learned the names of all the flowers—and never forgot them.15
“Those people had a remarkable effect on her,” says Wolders. “She always kept a picture of their terrier on her dressing-room table.” Many years later, she went back to look them up and helped their son adopt a child through the UN.
AUDREY WAS adjusting well to England, but English politics and the gathering storm over Europe were now compounding the maladjustment of her parents. In mid-1930s Britain, the growth and appeal of fascism were by no means universally condemned. Sir Oswald Mosley, once a top minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government, had formed the British Union of Fascists (BUF). His companion and future wife was Diana Mitford, whose sister Unity was also sympathetic to the movement. Ella was friendly with the Mitfords and evidently encouraged her rabidly anti-Communist husband to join up.
As the BUF grew in strength, the Hepburn-Rustons were openly involved in its fund-raising and recruitment. Ella was so devoted to Mosley that she publicly endorsed him in the April 26, 1935, edition of BUF’s weekly paper, The Blackshirt, a glamorous photo of herself accompanying her article:We who have heard the call of Fascism, and have followed the light on the upward road to victory, have been taught to understand what dimly we knew, and now fully realize.... At last we are breaking the bondage and are on the road to salvation.... We who follow Sir Oswald Mosley know that in him we have found a leader whose eyes are not riveted on earthly things, whose inspiration is of a higher plane, and whose idealism will carry Britain along to the bright light of the new dawn of spiritual rebirth.
A few weeks later, in May, Ella and her husband joined Mosley’s BUF delegation to Germany to observe conditions under the Nazis. They toured autobahns, factories, schools and housing developments, and had the heady honor of meeting Hitler himself at the Nazis’ Brown House headquarters in Munich. A group photo taken there—showing the Hepburn-Rustons with Unity Mitford, her sisters Pamela and Mary, and others—was long enshrined in a silver frame on Ella’s mantelpiece.
The extent to which Ella’s fascist involvement was sincere or merely in misguided support of her husband’s ambitions is still unknown. Her article and the Brown House photo are the only clear pieces of evidence, and she never elaborated to her daughter in later years. In any case, the thrill of meeting the Führer had no magical effect on their domestic situation. Almost immediately after their return from Germany, in that same month of May 1935, Ruston walked out on his wife and six-year-old girl.
Dutch sources claim Joseph Hepburn-Ruston was a heavy drinker and that he and Ella argued about it.16 But more compelling reasons for departure were contained in his increasing radicalism: He soon quit the BUF to join an even more violently anti-Semitic splinter group. Ella’s father was said to be incensed not only by his son-in-law’s politics but by the belief that Ruston was mismanaging the van Heemstras’ money and—worse—channeling some of it to fascist causes. By one account, Queen Wilhelmina herself urged the old Baron to silence Ella and pay off Ruston, if necessary to get him out of the family.17
Audrey called her father’s disappearance “the most traumatic event in my life” and “a tragedy from which I don’t think I’ve ever recovered. I worshiped him and missed him terribly from the day he disappeared.... If I could have just seen him regularly, I would have felt he loved me, and I would have felt I had a father. But as it was, I always envied other people’s fathers, came home with tears, because they had a daddy.”18 Equally painful was her mother’s reaction and the haunting memory of it:You look into your mother’s face, and it’s covered with tears, and you’re terrified. You say to yourself, “What’s going to happen to me?” The ground has gone out from under you....19 He really left. He just went out and never came back. Watching her agony was one of the worst experiences of my life. She cried for days until I thought she’d never stop, even when we went shopping. I was left with a sense of helplessness, of... not ever really understanding why Daddy had gone away.20
There was a frightening physical manifestation of the disaster, too. When her father left, she said, “my mother’s hair turned white overnight. [But she] never ever put him down.” Instead, “of necessity, my mother became a father too.”21 Ella began to spend more time in England with Audrey, who, despite her parents’ breakup, made the school’s honor roll and was making friends more easily. Most important, one of the many Miss Rigdens—a disciple of Isadora Duncan—was now helping her discover the art form that would captivate her for life.
“I fell in love with dancing,” she recalled. “In this village in Kent where I stayed, there was a young dancer who would come up from London once a week and give ballet classes. I loved it, just loved it.”22
Her life now settled down into a rather pleasant routine, largely undisturbed until the formal divorce of her parents in 1938. Ella got primary custody of nine-year-old Audrey. Hepburn-Ruston insisted that she remain in England and that he be given visitation rights
. Ella resisted the second demand but gave in when Audrey pleaded for it. It turned out to be a moot point, in view of his subsequent failure to exercise those rights.
A year later came another upheaval for Audrey in the monumental upheaval of the world. Her mother came to collect her one day from school and was chatting with the dance instructor, who wanted to develop the girl’s talent. Audrey overheard their conversation: “The teacher said, ‘Would you let me take her to London?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m taking her back to Holland.’”23
Ella and her sons had been visiting relatives in Arnhem when England declared war on Germany, following the Nazi invasion of Poland, in September 1939. Travel could be curtailed at any moment; she might be separated from her daughter for years. Ella returned in panic to Britain and hastily obtained court approval (over Hepburn-Ruston’s objections) to remove Audrey to Holland.
“She thought London was about to be bombed and that she and Audrey would be safer in Arnhem,” recalls Freddie Heineken.24 The notion seems foolish in hindsight but was not at the time: Holland was neutral and certain to remain so. Ella and most of her countrymen clung to the naive belief that Hitler would respect the neutrality of his “Dutch cousins.” Very few commercial planes were still permitted to fly, but Ella pulled strings to get Audrey on one of them.
“Somehow she had contacted my father and asked him to meet me at the train in London where I was coming in [from Kent],” she told writer Dominick Dunne half a century later. “They put me on this bright-orange plane [the Dutch national color], and it flew very low. It really was one of the last planes out. That was the last time I saw my father.”25