Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  Van der Linden had hoped to get in on the ground floor of the postwar Dutch movie industry and European coproductions. He also hoped to develop the talents of young Audrey, signing her up to a half-year contract with the intention of starting a new picture in six months. But when Dutch flopped on both sides of the channel, Van der Linden wasn’t able to raise the money.

  By her own admission, having been isolated in Nazi-occupied Arnhem for so many years, she was still ignorant of (and largely disinterested in) the “real” film world of America, Britain and France. But however modestly, her screen career had begun—even though she herself was hardly aware of it.

  SHE WAS more aware of modeling and more interested in the one or two beneficial results of her stint with Van der Linden: a part-time modeling job at Tonny Waagemans fashion salon in Amsterdam, and a chance to sit for artist Max Nauta, portraitist to the queen.6 Both engagements were prestigious, but neither produced any work in her field, which was dance. It was time to get serious and get to England, to partake of that Rambert scholarship. The pooled resources of Audrey and her mother were about one hundred pounds, sufficient to get them there and not much more.

  They finally made the crossing in late 1948, but the London that greeted them was grim compared to Amsterdam, and so was the British economy, compared with the faster Dutch recovery. Ella was shocked to find that one and four-pence-worth of meat was the weekly ration per person. It was almost as bad as wartime. The déjà vu specter of hunger was worrisome again, as was Audrey’s health. She had arrived in one piece, “but I had no stamina.”7

  Ella had hoped to unlock some funds left behind in 1939, but all attempts to get at her money failed.8 She and Audrey found no help from Ruston—nor did they find Ruston. In view of Ella’s pride and the fact that he was in great disrepute, she probably did not look hard for him. But Audrey did, in spite of her strong and lingering feelings of rejection:

  “I never heard from him or knew anything about him during the war. But after the war, curiosity took over. I wanted to know where he was, whether he was still alive, and through the Red Cross I found out that he lived in Ireland. But it took me many years before I could write to him, before I could say, ‘I want to see you.”’9j

  Ruston’s release from internment on the Isle of Man had been a long time coming and, by the time it was accomplished, he was ill, broke and unemployable. It was years before Audrey learned that he obtained sanctuary at a monastery in County Waterford, Ireland, where the Trappist abbot eventually helped him find a job with an insurance brokerage in Dublin.

  Needing sanctuary of their own, Audrey and her mother spent their first few weeks with old friends in Kent before Ella got down to finding the series of humble jobs that would sustain them in London—a virtual repetition of her experience in Amsterdam: first, in a florist’s; next as a cook and beautician; then some interior decorating and door-to-door cosmetics peddling. But she soon found the “situation” they really needed—a job combined with a flat—managing a block of Mayfair apartments at 65 South Audley Street, off Park Lane. The neighborhood was elegant; their unpretentious walk-up was not. But Ella had extraordinary faith in her daughter’s future and a commitment to it that dwarfed all sacrifice. There was joy as well, Audrey recalled:

  “My mother was delighted [to be] in London because we had a room together and could be together.... To be able to buy a pair of shoes when you wanted to, or to take a taxi when you wanted.... We always took undergrounds and buses [so] that if it rained we could afford a taxi or go to the movies.”10 With the memories of Arnhem still fresh, one counted one’s blessings and was thankful for such luxuries.

  One was even more thankful for Marie Rambert (1888—1982), whose assistance and inspiration to Audrey were typical in the three generations of dancers she cultivated. 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 Nijinsky in The Rite of Spring. With Ninette de Valois and Frederick Ashton, Rambert had founded the companies that would evolve into the Sadler’s Wells and the Royal Ballet. Diaghilev himself came to watch her dynamic rehearsals.

  In 1931, Rambert and her playwright husband, Ashley Dukes, opened The Ballet Club in a former church hall (vintage 1840) near Notting Hill Gate, part of which they would later rent to the famous Mercury Theatre. It was the first permanent ballet center in England—a theater, company and school—where the tiny production budgets went hand in hand with tiny salaries.

  Rambert was ever short of money but ever generous. She not only gave Audrey a scholarship to study but also took her into her home, housing and feeding her there for six months. That arrangement was a lifesaver for Ella and Audrey both.

  “They’d had a rotten time during the war,” recalls Rambert’s daughter Angela Dukes Ellis, “and mother took pity on them. My sister and I had already left home, and the enormous house in Camden Hill Gardens had plenty of spare rooms.

  “When the war came, the ballet theater closed down, and after the war, it became difficult to run because the unions were much stronger and you had to pay West End fees. The theater only seated 120 people and was impossible commercially, so it was turned once again into a studio and run as the Rambert School of Ballet until 1979.”11

  There, Audrey took her lessons in a drafty practice hall with a Dickensian coal fire and a battered upright piano, around the corner from Rambert’s house to which she returned in the early evening. Angela called around often to visit:

  “My mother had no idea whatsoever about running a house, cooking, or anything like that. This wonderful woman Helen Welton was with her for forty years did all that for her. When I would pop in to see Helen, Audrey and her own mother would be sitting in the kitchen talking to her.... My mother had always complained about the size of my feet, but Audrey had the same as mine—size 7. I bought a marvelous pair of warm, fur-lined shoes from her, which we’d never seen in England. She had had them for the Dutch winters, and I had them for many years.”

  Angela was struck by Audrey’s “lovely, elfin quality.” But Audrey was struggling with a variety of inferiority complexes beyond just her shoe size.

  “My technique didn’t compare with that of the girls who had had five years of Sadler’s Wells teaching, paid for by their families, and who had always had good food and bomb shelters,” she later said, in a rare expression of resentment. 12 “I also sensed that I was very tall....”13

  Her sense, put more bluntly on another occasion, was that “I was an Amazon, towering over the boys,” and she was tremendously self-conscious about it.14 “I tried everything to make it an asset. Instead of working on allegro—little small tight movements—I took extra courses in adagio, so I could use my long lines to advantage.”15

  Ida de Jong, her petite colleague at Gaskell’s in Amsterdam, had been particularly aware of it: “Audrey’s big handicap for the ballet was her height. If I was sitting next to her, my head only reached up to her shoulders. Tall people have a hard time in ballet, because it’s very difficult to find a proper partner.”16

  One who disagreed from firsthand experience was her fellow dancer Ronald Hynde, who had come to the Rambert studio the previous year at age fifteen: “She was this very pretty, strange Dutch girl who suddenly arrived at the Rambert school—slight accent, beautiful face, everyone’s idea of Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, but with something different about her. I used to partner her in exercises, and she had a tiny waist. She was tallish, but one was never aware he was behind a giant when supporting her.”17

  But Audrey thought otherwise. And to her real or imagined problem of height was added one of weight. In London, she said, “I went on an eating binge. I would eat anything in sight and in any quantity. I’d empty out a jam jar with a spoon. I was crazy about everything I could lay my hands on when the food started appearing. I became quite tubby and put on twenty pounds.”18

 
; Some remembered her then as a “balloonlike teenager” who, with the determination that became her trademark, acquired a gazelle-like frame in two months. Soon enough—too soon and more than enough—she lost thirty pounds by ruthlessly eliminating all starches and sweets from her diet. “You have to look at yourself objectively,” she would say, “as if you were some kind of tool, and then decide exactly what you must do.”19

  Her assessment of her own tools was severe. She made few new friends and concentrated totally on dance until the need for money led her to moonlight, on weekends and holidays, as a model for several commercial photographers who were beguiled by her unique, pixieish face. One of them snapped that face and put it in a thousand British drugstores, advertising the benefits of Lacto-Calamine complexion lotion.

  These initial forays into English modeling reinforced her awareness of fashion and lifelong resolve—if not compulsion—to find the designs and colors that showed her to best advantage. Black and white and muted colors such as beige and pink “tend to make my eyes and hair seem darker,” she felt, “whereas bright colors overpower me and wash me out.” Low-heeled shoes, to deemphasize her height, were always a must.

  Many other aspiring performers, men as well as women, were dabbling in fashion photography then. One of them was the future James Bond, Roger Moore, whom Audrey enlisted in her UNICEF work four decades later: “We modeled together about 455 years ago in London,” Moore would say, “when Audrey was very young and I was middle-aged in the late forties.”20

  A job was a job. Anything to pick up a few extra pounds.

  AUDREY AT TWENTY had the increasingly sinking feeling that she was not destined to become a solo ballerina. Aside from the other issues, she still needed five more years of training even to qualify for a corps de ballet position. “I couldn’t afford to put in all those years to end up earning five pounds a week, which was the going rate then,” she said.

  Rambert now told her, gently but firmly, that she had neither the physique nor the talent to make it as a classical dancer. Yet soon after, when a recruiter from a government-sponsored company visited Rambert’s studio in search of dancers for a South American tour, Audrey was offered a position. She might have viewed that as evidence that Rambert ’s verdict was wrong. She was badly in need of money. But Audrey declined the tour, with her customary realism, and pondered the alternatives.

  A dancers’ casting call had just been announced for the London version of High Button Shoes, the American hit musical with Jule Styne music and Jerome Robbins choreography to be recreated intact by British producer Archie Thomson. Highlight of the show was Robbins’s comic “Mack Sennett Ballet,” a Keystone Kops chase in black-and-white makeup, simulating a silent movie, that called for unusual virtuosity on the part of the dancers.

  Audrey was one of a thousand who tried out for the chorus line and—to her own amazement—one of ten who got the job, at eight pounds ten shillings ($35) a week. Her fellow bathing beauties included sixteen-year-old Alma Cogan, the future “Miss Show Business” of England, and Kay Kendall, the future wife of Rex Harrison—both of whom she would befriend, and both of whom would die of cancer in their early thirties. “I was stiff as a poker as a jazz dancer,” she said, “always off beat on the simplest syncopation.... Going into a musical was the best thing that could have happened to me.”21

  The show opened at London’s Hippodrome on December 22, 1948, for a 291-performance run. Audrey never forgot her one and only line—the first she ever spoke on a professional stage:

  “Lou Parker, the star, stood in the middle and I went tearing across holding another girl by her 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.”22

  The show’s featured male dancer was Nickolas Dana, who today recalls the beautiful seventeen-minute pas de deux, choreographed by Robbins for Dana and a girl who often missed rehearsal and required a stand-in:

  “Once the boy picked up the girl, she didn’t touch the floor until the end of it. Just gorgeous. Audrey was the prettiest girl in the show, and one day I asked her to try it and she went up like a feather. I recommended she be the understudy and from then on, she was. I thought she was a beautiful dancer.”23

  Dana also has a vivid recollection of Audrey’s offstage wardrobe at the time: “She had one skirt, 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—or fold it in two and make it look very strange. She had the gift, the flair of how to dress.”

  Dana’s agents, Dorothy McAusland and Olive Bridges, were always on the lookout for new talent, and when Dana told them about Audrey, “They came to see the show and called me a couple days later and said, ‘There’s not very much talent. She’s a nice little dancer, but nothing spectacular.’”

  Talent was in the eye of the beholder, of course, and perhaps also in the beholder’s gender. In early 1949, London impresario Cecil Landeau came to see High Button Shoes and left thinking that nice little dancer worth capturing. Nobody liked the overbearing Landeau, but he was powerful in the West End and currently preparing a lavish new revue of Ziegfeld proportions.

  Sauce Tartare was a song-and-dance extravaganza with twenty-seven comic sketches and musical episodes satirizing different nationalities in a mock travelogue. Landeau claimed to have travelled 14,000 miles to find the perfect international cast. His coup was singer Muriel Smith, the black American star of Broadway’s Carmen Jones. The British members of cast were top-notch, too: Renee Houston, Jack Melford, Audrey’s friend Alma Cogan—and Audrey herself among the five chorus hoofers.

  Produced and directed by Landeau, Sauce Tartare opened to raves on May 18, 1949, and enjoyed a healthy run of 433 performances at the Cambridge Theatre. Even before that sauce grew cold, Landeau was stirring up a fresh one, Sauce Piquante, which likewise opened at the Cambridge, on April 27, 1950, and likewise starred Muriel Smith. This time the cast was mostly British and included some of the country’s hottest entertainers. Chief among them was female impersonator Douglas Byng, whose rendition of “I’m One of the Queens of England” always brought down the house. Moira Lister did a riotously funny burlesque of Vivien Leigh’s Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire.

  Audrey was back, too—with bigger bits and bigger paycheck, raised by Landeau to a downright affluent fifteen pounds a week. One of her jobs was to walk across the stage in a skimpy French-maid outfit, holding up the title card for each new skit. Though she was cast primarily as a dancer, Landeau upgraded her role and she figured in several comedy sketches, much to the annoyance of her peers.

  “I can’t stand it!” complained the big-busted dancer Aud Johanssen. “I’ve got the best tits on stage, and yet they’re all staring at a girl who hasn’t got any.»24

  One of the show’s most popular performers was Bob Monkhouse, soon to become the BBC’s first contract comedian and later a writer for Bob Hope and Jack Benny. Monkhouse and Hepburn became friends, though he disagreed with Nick Dana’s assessment of her dance skill, as he told biographer Ian Woodward:The standard of dancing in Sauce Piquante was ... superior, but Audrey’s was the poorest.... If she’d been a good dancer, the other girls would not have minded so much.... They all loved her offstage, but hated her on, because they knew that even if she jumped up and down, the audience would still be attracted to her. What Audrey had in Sauce Piquante, and what has sustained her through [her] career, was an enormous, exaggerated feeling of “I’m helpless—I need you.” When people sense this, they respond to it immediately, perhaps not realising why they’re doing so. Audrey had it in abundance.... Everybody in the audience thought, “I want to look after little Audrey.” She seemed to be too pretty, too unaware of the dangers.

  It was quite extraordinary. [That] impish grin seemed to go from one ear-hole to the other. She looked incredibly radiant becau
se, at that time, it was uncontrolled. The lips actually turned inside-out and the eyes went sort of potty, like a Walt Disney character. It was so lovely, one stepped back a pace. She later learned to tone it down a bit.25

  Monkhouse remembered that during their first conversation, in rehearsals, she had said: “I’m half-Irish, half-Dutch, and I was born in Belgium. If I was a dog, I’d be in a hell of a mess!” Animals were a running theme. One night during the run, when Muriel Smith showed up with a bedraggled cat she had just rescued off the street, Audrey immediately adopted the thing.

  “We called the cat Tomorrow, at Audrey’s suggestion,” says Monkhouse. “It was rather a rude joke, stemming from the fact that [it was] a male cat that had been castrated, and you know what they say about tomorrow never coming.”26

  But for the most part, she tended to keep her distance from the other performers, and the insecurity they perceived in her was real. “In musicals,” she said, “I was the tense, rigid girl trained for ballet who had to watch everyone else to find out what to do.”27Nobody was quite sure if she was a dancer, an actress or a model—including Audrey herself.

  Fashion photographer Anthony Beauchamp had seen and admired her in the first of the Sauces at a time when the magazines he worked for were looking for “a new face.” He went backstage after the show and asked to photograph her. She said she was flattered but couldn’t afford his fee. Beauchamp assured her there would be no charge. “I kept looking again and again at the startling eyes which were never still,” he said. When his pictures appeared in British Vogue, her unusual wide-eyed “look” produced a nice stir—and another modeling job with British press agents Frederic Mullally and Suzanne Warner.