by Barry Paris
“I remember lots of flour and butter and oatmeal and all the things that we hadn’t seen in ages! ... One of the first meals I had was oatmeal made with canned milk, and I put so much sugar on it and I ate a whole plateful and was deadly ill afterwards because I couldn’t absorb it. I wasn’t used to rich food anymore. I was hardly used to food anymore, let alone that kind of thing. But it was everything we dreamed of. ”93
She was sixteen years old, five-foot-six and weighed ninety pounds. After five years, she was suffering from asthma, jaundice and other diseases stemming from malnutrition, including anemia and severe edema, a swelling of the joints and limbs in which the blood literally turns to water. “It begins with your feet,” Audrey recounted clinically, “and when it reaches your heart, you die. With me it was above the ankles when we were liberated.”94
She was also having problems with colitis and irregular periods—possibly endometriosis, common among women dancers and athletes with little body fat—and her metabolism would be permanently affected. In some ways, she would never fully recover from the war: To the end of her life, she never weighed more than 110 pounds. It would be claimed that she also suffered from some form of anorexia or bulimia, of which the war was the source; and that she later deprived herself of, or felt she could do without, food. (See Chapter 9, pp. 303-304.)
But past and future pain were set aside for the moment, in celebration of the present. A few nights after the liberation, Canadian troops plugged a projector into an outdoor electric generator in the town square and—to the joy of Audrey and her teenage friends—gave them an alfresco screening of the first Hollywood film they had seen since before the war.
Audrey and Ella’s joy was more profound a few weeks later when Alexander suddenly emerged from years as an onderduiker—in underground hiding—with a pregnant wife. On July 17, 1945, Audrey became an aunt with the birth of their son Michael. More miraculously, soon after, Ian showed up at their door—having walked most of the 325 miles from Berlin to Arnhem. Five thousand Dutch boys sent for forced labor in Germany had died there. Ian’s family now thanked God that he was not one of them.
“We had almost given up,” said Audrey, “when the doorbell rang and it was Ian....95 We lost everything, of course—our houses, our possessions, our money. But we didn’t give a hoot. We got through with our lives, which was all that mattered.”96
As SOON AS it was possible to do so, they returned to Arnhem and their little house at 8A Jansbinnensingel. “Unfortunately,” Audrey concluded, “people basically learn little from war. We needed each other so badly that we were kind, we hid each other, we gave each other something to eat. But when it was over, people were just the same—gossipy and mean.”97
But Audrey was neither of those, and she was exhilarated by the existential liberation that came with the military one: “Life started again and all the things you’d never had, never seen, never eaten, never worn, started to come back again. That was such a stimulus.”98 So was the freedom to choose and do what she wished.
Her first choice, in the summer of 1945, was to volunteer for work in the Royal Military Invalids Home, a facility for injured and retired veterans in the Arnhem suburb of Bronbeek. It was, and remains, a sprawling, beautiful white structure, built in 1862 by King Willem III, Queen Wilhelmina’s father. There, Audrey helped minister to soldiers of many nationalities, one of whom would happily link up with her twenty-two years later.
“While she was being shelled in Arnhem, I was in a tank a few miles away,” said Terence Young, the future director of a fine thriller called Wait Until Dark. “We were stuck on that single road into the town and never able to come to the relief of the unfortunate parachutists stuck there.”99
Wounded in the last weeks of the war, Young was now lying in the Arnhem hospital. “In the next room to mine,” he recalled, “was a legendary figure in the parachute regiments, ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert, a brigadier general. When he found out I was a filmmaker, he asked me about doing a film on Arnhem. That same afternoon, director Brian Desmond Hurst arrived with the head of Gaumont-British news to ask if I would write a script about Arnhem, using the real-life characters.”
The resulting Men of Arnhem, codirected by Hurst and Young, is one of the most powerful of all World War II documentaries, and though Audrey had nothing to do with it, she had her own encounter with those filmmakers at the time. In September 1945, recalls David Heringa, Audrey’s friend from the Christian Science classes, “her mother brought her to our house to see if we could introduce her to some big shots of Gaumont-British who were staying with us and making [Men of Arnhem]. But they could only suggest [that she] continue ballet lessons and then, when things were more normal, come to England. We all thought Mother van Heemstra a bit pushy about Audrey.” 100
Characterizations of Ella were always remarkably consistent. With typical resilience, she now reapplied herself to Audrey’s career, which could no longer be served in the ruins of Arnhem. At twenty-five and twenty-one, her brothers were on their own. Alexander worked first in government reconstruction projects and then in Indonesia for British Petroleum Matape. Ian joined the multinational firm Unilever (a merger of Britain’s Lever Brothers and the Dutch Margarine Company), whose postwar product line featured such previously unavailable delicacies as peanut butter. Only Audrey remained in the nest—and Ella decided it was time to move the nest to Amsterdam.
No great immediate prospects awaited most of the thousands of displaced Hollanders who jammed that city in October of 1945. But Ella had a large network of friends and was not too proud to take the first honest work she could find, which turned out to be cook-housekeeper for a wealthy family who also provided her a small basement flat. She soon left for a slightly better post as a florist’s shop manager, and a slightly better apartment nearby.
The overriding reason for relocating to Amsterdam was Audrey: Winja Marova had given her a glowing recommendation to study with Sonia Gaskell, then the leading name in Dutch ballet. Holland had been on the cutting edge of dance since 1658 when “The Ballet of Maidens” featured female dancers, decades before women were allowed on stage in more sophisticated Paris.
In that tradition, Gaskell nowadays ran a school and soon founded a company that would evolve into the Netherlands (Dutch National) Ballet.h “The classic dance is dead,” she declared. Gaskell’s school was known in Europe and America for avant-garde choreography and the hard-edged modern music to which it was often set—jazz and atonal included. She was also adept at discovering, encouraging and harboring young talent.
Audrey was one of her discoveries and now joined Gaskell’s “Balletstudio ’45,” where she danced classroom roles to such dissimilar composers as Bach, Debussy, Villa-Lobos, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, sometimes choreographing the exercises herself. Audrey, said Gaskell, “had no money to pay for the lessons. Yet I thought she deserved a chance. In the two floors of studio space below my apartment, I found her a tiny room in which she barely could move, but she loved it and became a very serious pupil.”101 What Audrey learned from Gaskell was “the work ethic—don’t complain, don’t give in even if you’re tired, don’t go out the night before you have to dance. Sonia taught me that if you really worked hard, you’d succeed, and that everything had to come from the inside.”102
In May 1946, Audrey was chosen to dance with Gaskell’s top student star, Beatrix Leoni, in a matinee performance at Amsterdam’s Hortus Theater. “She didn’t have a lot of great technique,” wrote the Algemeen Handelsblad newspaper critic of her three solos, “but she definitely had talent.”
For her seventeenth birthday that month, Ella gave her a season ticket for the upcoming season of Amsterdam’s great Concertgebouw Orchestra, and for Christmas she got tickets to a series of Beethoven string quartets. Her living arrangement with Gaskell ended. She was back with her mother and so broke that she couldn’t even afford to ride the tram, but even in the most inclement weather, she walked the considerable distance from their flat to the Concertgeb
ouw and never missed a concert.i
She often took along Anneke van Wijk, her friend and fellow dance student. Van Wijk remembers her as a hard worker who practiced incessantly—sponta—neous, funny, cultivated and never arrogant or competitive to the point of rivalry:
“Audrey’s expression was fabulous. The way she used her hands and eyes showed that she also had talent for acting. Her enormous eyes were not to be believed. I asked her once, ‘What are you doing to make them seem so wide?’ She said, ‘Nothing. They’ve always been this way.’”103 When van Wijk knew her, she was just “a normal Dutch girl with chubby cheeks,” by no means heavy but not thin, either. “I remember that because I used to take showers with her after the lessons. It wasn’t until later, when she started to act, that she became so skinny.”
Van Wijk thought they were both a bit old to be starting with Gaskell and that they had lost too much time because of the war. Partly with that in mind, she and her husband introduced Audrey to photographer Helena Voute, at whose studio Audrey began to do some posing. With her innate stage presence and good posture, she quickly developed her natural feel for it.
Ella was still moving around considerably in those days. Her network of friends included the Heineken brewery family, whose son Freddie recalls seeing Audrey and passing along the esoteric skill he was then cultivating:
“I gave her her first tap-dance lesson. Her nickname was Rimple, for some reason, because when she laughed, she had a little dimple or ‘rimple.’ She and Ella lived for a while in Noordwijk [just southwest of Amsterdam], where I lived, too. They spent a lot of time at my mother’s house. Ella was taking care of our little poodle. She was a funny, down-to-earth woman with enormous problems. I don’t think Audrey would have gotten anywhere without her.”104
Ella was now subsidizing her daughter’s lessons by doing facials and makeup at the fashionable beauty salon of P. C. Hoofstraat. By one account, she was also selling cosmetics door-to-door. For a time, Audrey developed a little avocation as a hatmaker, selling her creations to her mother’s clients.
“Audrey had exquisite taste,” said her friend Loekie van Oven, a Gaskell dancer who was several years older and took her under her wing. “She and her mother had no money, but they had class and style. Audrey used to go to department stores in Amsterdam and buy plain-looking hats and, with her artistic talent, easily change them into something really nice.”105
Audrey and Loekie spent a lot of time together, talking and dreaming. As there was never enough money for proper dance gear, “We used to wear ballet shoes made by a Belgian shoemaker that were like wooden shoes—very heavy. Audrey was quite ingenious. She used to make tights from Ace bandages and dye them by soaking them in water with red crepe paper.”106
Audrey in Amsterdam was “very shy and withdrawn,” says van Oven, partly because of her monastic living conditions and lack of money, but mostly because of the strict nature of ballet life itself: “Love or érotique do not play an important part in it.... It had nothing to do with sexuality. We flirted sometimes, but that was it. The dancing was physically very fatiguing, so we had to put all our energy into that. Dancing was everything for Audrey.... She could put a spell on an audience and subdue them. There was poetry and motion in anything she touched.”
Though Audrey was ambitious, Loekie felt she chafed at the even greater ambition of her mother. Ella longed for a return to prominence in the class in which she (and Audrey, for that matter) had been raised. She wanted Audrey to meet more of “the right kind of people” and preferably to marry one of them. Her pressure contributed to Audrey’s withdrawal, says van Oven: “A lot of people thought it was interesting and exciting to know the daughter of a baroness. But Audrey didn’t want to have anything to do with that. She really kept her distance from it.”
Audrey was one of Gaskell’s best and favorite pupils, but not everyone was happy with the mistress. Gaskell believed a dancer’s expression “was prettier when the person felt bad,” says van Oven, and often helped to induce such feelings. Dancer Ida de Jong, who had attended Gaskell’s school before the war, gone to England and then returned to Gaskell in 1948, calls her “not very kind.” When Ida later left to join the Dutch Opera ballet, “Sonia never spoke to me again.”107
More than once before leaving, Ida told Audrey, “You must not stay in Holland—you must go to England. You’ll have a lot more opportunities there, and you don’t have to ask to come in because you are half English.”108 As an afterthought, she added that Audrey could also get movie parts in London, which was “an easy way to make some money.”
Immigration into Britain was then quite difficult indeed, requiring much documentation and a work permit. But Ida was right: With a British father and British passport, Audrey could go there if she chose, and after almost three years with Gaskell, she finally decided to do so. During a short preliminary visit to London with her mother, she auditioned for the celebrated Marie Rambert ballet school and was accepted, with scholarship.
The bad news was that she would have to pay her own living expenses. That, combined with Ella’s current financial crunch, meant her enrollment would have to be postponed, and Audrey was hugely disappointed. But the goal was in sight.
CHAPTER 2
England and the Chorus Line (1948—1951)
“I can’t stand it! I know I’ve got the best tits on stage, and yet they’re all staring at a girl who hasn’t got any.”
—AUD JOHANSSEN, chorine
LONG AFTERWARD, AUDREY WAS ASKED IF SHE FELT HER CAREER had been carried along by some predestined momentum. The romantic question got an unromantic reply. No, she said—simply “by the need to work.” She had a desire “to wear a tutu and dance at Covent Garden. That was my dream, but not a plan. I never thought I’d make it.”1
She later said she realized, even in Holland, that she was “a little too old” for the rigors of becoming a ballerina, and that any human or divine momentum nudging her toward London was “because I wanted very much to become a choreographer and Rambert was known for developing young choreographers. So I wanted to be Margot Fonteyn and a choreographer as well.”2 But London was on hold due to the cash shortage. She would stay put in the present for an interlude that heralded her art form of the future.
Elsewhere in Amsterdam in 1948, a pair of Dutch freelance filmmakers had a clever idea—on paper, at least. Director Charles Huguenot Van der Linden (1909-1987) and his associate Henry M. Josephson were making a low-budget travelogue about Holland for Britain’s Rank film company. With KLM “celebrity pilot” A. Viruly at the controls, they had flown over the country and, from the cockpit, shot scenes of the meadows, farmlands, Golden Age houses and modern Amsterdam below. They now concocted a thin story—for export—about a British cameraman who has seven days in which to learn Dutch. Some loose farce and as many pretty girls as they could find would be intercut with the landscape footage they already had in the can.
There are multiple versions of every legendary “discovery,” and Audrey’s case was no different. By one account, the two filmmakers came to Gaskell’s studio on their talent search and instantly agreed on “the tall, thin girl with the eyes.”3 Over the years, Van der Linden and Josephson squabbled about who saw her first. Most likely, she just showed up at their office under the watchful eye of her mother, who stated the obvious: Audrey needed work. Could they find some little role for her?
“I saw a dream coming into the room,” Van der Linden recalled. She was fetchingly dressed in a little print frock, gloves and hat, and he decided to do a screentest then and there. She was taken outside and directed to cross a street and walk toward the camera. She did so, stopping in close-up. A voice behind the camera asked if she wanted to be in a movie. She smiled a bit quizzically and nodded. That was it. Smitten by her fresh look, Van der Linden and Josephson offered her a job on the spot. They were amused—though Ella was not—by her response: “I am not an actress. You will regret it.”4
There would be no reason to regret Au
drey, if many to lament the film. She played the KLM stewardess who welcomes cameraman “George” to Holland. That starring role went to Wam Heskes, a radio comedian better known as “Koes Koen”—a sort of Dutch Will Rogers—on his down-home broadcasts. This would be his screen debut as well as the stewardess’s.5
Van der Linden had been so pleased with Audrey’s little test that he recycled it, in thrifty Dutch fashion, to help establish the premise of his self-conscious film-within-a-film: Nederlands in Zeven Lessen (Dutch in Seven Lessons, or Dutch at the Double), “A G-B Instructional Production,” opens with George arriving in Amsterdam from England. He has only a week to make a film about Holland, and he keeps getting distracted by all the pretty Dutch girls—starting with Audrey, whom he spots on the street. In their exchange of pleasantries, we hear Hepburn’s first words on screen, spoken softly (and incongruously, to American ears) in that odd “foreign” language called Dutch.
That’s the test footage. It cuts sharply from Audrey the pedestrian to Audrey the flight attendant. Her character’s name? “Audrey.” She shows George around the Amsterdam airport, then glances at him coquettishly and says “Goodbye”—in English, for some reason—with a wry look in her almond eyes. “The drinks he had later with Audrey were his own personal business,” says the narrator, hinting at naughty doings.
A tedious train tour is followed by more aerial footage shot from KLM’s new state-of-the-art “PH-TAF” commercial craft, while the narrator relentlessly dispenses facts: “The Dutch live four hundred people to the square mile....” The conclusion is a cheesecake sailing sequence in swimsuits.
It was Dutch-British corn of the stalest kind. The premiere took place May 7, 1948, three days after Audrey turned nineteen. Dutch in Seven Lessons survives in both the seventy-nine-minute Dutch original and a mercifully truncated thirty-eight-minute English version. Audrey’s dialogue was of course cut out of the latter, and she was not mentioned by the reviewers of either. Most charitable was the Handelsblad’s critic, who called it “no masterpiece.”