Audrey Hepburn

by Barry Paris

  At the Academy Awards that year—1992—Hepburn substituted for Mother Teresa in presenting an honorary Oscar to the ailing Indian director Satyajit Ray. Audrey got a standing ovation when she appeared in her Indian-style, off-the-shoulder Givenchy dress to introduce Ray’s pre-recorded acceptance speech from his hospital bed in Calcutta.ca

  A few months earlier, when honored in Dallas by the U.S.A. Film Festival for her own contribution to motion pictures, she was asked how she felt about all the lavish praise.

  “It’s wonderful,” she replied, “but at the same time ... you just die in a way. I mean, all those compliments. You wish you could spread it over the year. It’s like eating too much chocolate cake all at once. You sort of don’t believe any of it, and yet you’re terribly grateful.”43 She was deeply immersed in her “second career” with UNICEF by then, and—she told Dominick Dunne in Vanity Fair—she felt the same about the praise she was receiving for her UNICEF work:

  “It makes me self-conscious. It’s because I’m known, in the limelight, that I’m getting all the gravy, but if you knew, if you saw some of the people who make it possible for UNICEF to help these children survive. These are the people who do the jobs—the unknowns, whose names you will never know.... I at least get a dollar a year, but they don’t.”44

  On the other hand, she said, “I’m glad I’ve got a name because I’m using it for what it’s worth.”45

  “HER CAREER can be split into two chapters,” says her friend Leslie Caron. “In the first part she received all the glory she could hope for, and in the second part she gave back, in spades, what she had received.”46

  On the heels of the Allies’ liberation of Arnhem in 1945 came UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, forerunner of UNICEF, bringing desperately needed food, medicine and clothing. Audrey, we know, was one of the first beneficiaries, and her emotional commitment to that agency began then and there. “There is a moral obligation,” she would say, “that those who have should give to those who don’t.”47

  The death of actor Danny Kaye in March 1987 left a void at UNICEF. For the previous twenty years, he had roamed the world as its most popular Goodwill Ambassador. Only someone extraordinary could replace him or, at least, take over part of his work.

  Now that her sons were grown, in 1988, instead of retiring in comfort to the jet set, Hepburn began the job that would occupy the last five years of her life: Special Ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund. “I auditioned for this job for forty-five years,” she would say, “and I finally got it.48 I always felt very powerless when I would see the terrible pictures on TV. But I was offered a wonderful opportunity to do something [and it is] is a marvelous therapy to the anguish I feel.”49

  How long did it take her to accept the position?

  “About two minutes,” she said. “I’ve always had an enormous love of children. When I was little, I used to embarrass my mother by trying to pick babies out of prams at the market. The one thing I dreamed of in my life was to have children of my own. It always boils down to the same thing—of not only receiving love but wanting desperately to give it.”50

  There was an even simpler way to put it: “It’s something I’d do for my child, so why not for others?”

  The waters she first tested were in Macao, where UNICEF Portugal asked her to be guest of honor at a benefit concert in October 1987. In the beautiful Church of St. Lorenzo there, she delivered brief remarks—exactly two minutes—gently reminding her audience that 40,000 children die every day from preventable causes. She sat down briskly at the end, turned to Rob and asked, “Did I do all right?” It was her first real appearance for UNICEF, Wolders recalls: “She knew little about what was expected of her and was pacing outside in her evening dress beforehand because it meant the world to her.”

  She had done all right, indeed.

  Back at Macao’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Audrey shed her evening gown in favor of jeans for a late-night meeting with Jack Glattbach, UNICEF’s Regional Information Officer. (“Why did I think she looked better in T-shirt and jeans?” he wondered to himself.) She told him she was content in Switzerland and didn’t really want to travel much but would be glad to help UNICEF again—“if they ask me.” He made sure that she was asked, and over the next five years she often said, “It’s all Jack’s fault for getting me into this!” That, says Glattbach, “is the best thing I’ve been blamed for in all my years at UNICEF.”51 Indeed, he helped launch her on the course that would redefine her life.

  Two months later in Tokyo, she was the “warmup act” for UNICEF director James P. Grant at a benefit concert by the World Philharmonic Orchestra—musicians from fifty-eight countries, under the baton of Giuseppe Sinopoli. It was there that she met Christa Roth, chief of UNICEF’s Geneva office, who soon became one of her closest friends and helpmates.

  “She had a tremendous following in Japan,” Roth recalls. “It was mind-boggling. In Tokyo we organized a press conference in a normal hotel room. We thought maybe a few journalists would come, but there were tenfold—we had to change rooms to accommodate them all.”52

  For Roth, as for so many, Hepburn had been a role model. “I’m fifty-four,” she says, “so when I was a teenager, it was the time of Brigitte Bardot—and I was as skinny as Audrey. I thought, if it’s not wrong for her, why should I feel bad about looking like that?” From now on, back in Switzerland, it was Christa who assisted her in a hundred ways, taking care of logistical details and helping her fight for the things she wanted.

  After her successes in Macao and Japan, requests began pouring in from the UNICEF committees of Turkey, Finland, Holland, Australia—“and in our enthusiasm, we accepted all of them,” says Wolders, including one from Ireland. Dublin was a melancholy place, and after accepting the invitation, they had misgivings based on the memory of the previous sad visit with her father. But it turned out to be a cherished experience.

  When they arrived there on September 30, 1988, the Irish committee chair-woman told her, “There’s a lady who says she knows you from your childhood. We didn’t want to tell her to go away.” It turned out to be the elderly Greta Hanley, Audrey’s nanny in Brussels half a century before—a woman she adored. Their emotional reunion was the first of many, through UNICEF, that brought her closer to her “extended family” all over the world.

  Hepburn’s commitment to UNICEF grew stronger, and quickly. “It’s hard to be too late, to see a child that already has polio,” she said. “It shouldn’t happen anymore, [nor should] a child be a victim of war. That’s why we have to get on with it. It is a question of time for so many children. They don’t have time to wait.” She often quoted Charles Dickens: “In the little world in which children have their existence, nothing is so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.”53

  In later years, the powerful images of Audrey Hepburn in the Third World would leave the rest of the world with the impression that she made dozens of UNICEF pilgrimages. In fact, over four years, there were just eight missions—but of increasingly profound impact.

  THE FIRST JOURNEY: ETHIOPIA-MARCH 1988

  Audrey’s first field-trip assignment for UNICEF was designed “to attract attention, before it was too late” to the poorest country in the world. Ethiopia was in dire distress. Millions were starving from famine, drought and civil war. One in four Ethiopian children was dead by age five. Those who survived were grossly malnourished, many of them blind from vitamin A deficiency. The refugee centers, filled to overflowing, were potential death camps due to epidemics.

  The logistics were complicated by many stops and unreliable transportation. “We flew across the country in comfortless, clattering transport aircraft,” said UNICEF board member John Williams, who went along. Audrey would sit next to the pilot, gazing down at the dry riverbeds, naked mountains and occasional patches of green, teeming with people. “She was awed. By the second day she knew the name and background of each of the twenty people accompanying her—Eu
ropean pilots, Ethiopian minders, American journalists and UNICEF officials.”54

  One of those people was UN photographer John Isaac, a soft-spoken veteran of many such hardship missions, with whom she and Rob formed a deep bond. This was Isaac’s fifth trip to Ethiopia in four years, and during their week together in Eritrea and Tigré—the areas hardest hit by drought and civil war—she soaked up every tidbit of information he gave her, educating herself on the technical problems of food transport and water.

  Isaac explained to her that the drought was due to the lack of dams to hold rainwater, and that a new one was being constructed. Audrey wanted to see it.

  “Ethiopians are very proud,” says Isaac. “They don’t want handouts. This was a very good program where they would do a day’s work for a certain amount of grain. We watched thousands of people carrying water and rocks on their backs, mixing the mud and building this huge dam with their own hands. The pictures from there are very biblical.”

  Isaac had traveled with Harry Belafonte and Liv Ullmann and other fine UNICEF ambassadors, but Audrey and her sense of humor were different, he says: “I told her, ‘When the plane lands, I want to get out first to get a shot of you.’ I was nervous—it was my first big ‘event’ with her—and as I was getting out, my camera fell with the battery pack and wires and everything connected to me. Audrey was behind me and said, ‘John, you dropped your—equipment. Well, thank God it’s still attached. Can I get it up for you?’ Everybody cracked up.”55

  The fact that Hepburn met John Isaac early on “is what colored much of Audrey’s feelings towards UNICEF,” says Rob Wolders. “He really inspired her. He spoiled us. We were looking for more people like that, and they don’t exist.”

  Isaac, a native of India, had been one of the UN’s most brilliant photographers for twenty years. His first assignment was the war in Lebanon; his second, the Vietnamese boat people, followed by ten years of work in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Ethiopia. His personality and philosophy had a profound impact on Audrey:

  “For me, human dignity is more important than getting that ‘great’ picture,” he says. “I try not to take anybody’s dignity away. One of the boat people in Thailand was a little girl who was raped by twenty pirates, her father was shot, her mother committed suicide. I saw her washed up on the shore. A nurse said, ‘She hasn’t spoken a word. She just stares at me.’

  “I didn’t want to photograph her. I went back to the hotel, bought some chocolates. I had some Vietnamese music and brought back my tape recorder, sat next to her, and played the music for her. After about ten minutes, she put out her hand and I gave her some chocolates. To me, that was worth ten thousand pictures. I told some nuns, ‘You have to rescue this girl,’ and they took her to California. A lot of people said, ‘That’s not your job.’ Well, I’m a human being first. I don’t care about the Pulitzer prize.”

  Audrey, too, had to adjust to the emotional as well as physical stress, and to the political constraints of the job.

  “Working with the UN is sometimes very frustrating,” says Isaac, “because you’re in the middle. You can’t support this or that side. Initially, she was flustered by that. You want to sympathize. But she took a stand on a lot of things. She was so worried about her first UNICEF press conference.”56

  In preparation for that, back in Addis Ababa, “she was determined to master every nuance of the labyrinthine politics of war and drought,” says John Williams, who spent hours drilling questions and answers with her.“57 Videotapes of the press conference show she was not only nervous but on the verge of tears—hands shaking visibly when she sipped a glass of water—as she tried to explain to the media what she had seen. In the end, she was powerfully articulate and moving.

  The only one who thought she could have done better was Audrey herself. Everyone else sat up and took notice, including the Marxist government of Ethiopia, which found reason to criticize her, thus provoking a second round of international publicity during which she declared, “A child is a child is a child, whether his parents are Marxists or Nazis.”

  The challenge was just beginning. Preparing to leave her Addis Ababa hotel, she suddenly realized she had sent down the bags containing all of her clothes. She was in her underwear, recalls Rob, who obligingly gave her his raincoat, which hung down to her ankles. She wore it on the plane home and during her press conference at the Rome airport. Italy was the first stop of an exhausting postmortem press tour of America, Switzerland, Finland and Germany, talking about Ethiopia in as many as fifteen interviews a day. “I think,” she said, with typical modesty, “it made people aware that there were needs.”58

  WHETHER IT WAS a two-minute speech at the Oscars or a two-hour one for UNICEF, “it scares the wits out of me,” she said.59 “My stomach goes to pieces and my head starts to ache.” She had such stage fright, says her daughter-in-law Leila, “that you could literally see her knees knocking behind the podium.”60 While accepting her Golden Globe award in 1990, “I was terribly concerned that the mike would pick up the thumping of my heart while I was speaking,” she said. “My epithet will be, ‘It’s nerves what done her in,’ as Eliza Doolittle would say.”61

  Even so, she was getting better at it fast, and at thinking on her feet. In her first BBC interview, asked for proof that UNICEF’s food distribution efforts ever succeeded, she thought a moment and replied sweetly, “If a famine is averted, you don’t hear about it, do you?”62

  Cannily, she and Christa Roth began to refine her dealings with the press. “Many times,” says Roth, “people would ask for an interview about UNICEF when they really just wanted to talk about movies. She would talk an hour about, say, Ethiopia and five minutes about films, but the story would be 10 percent UNICEF and 90 percent movies. It bothered her a lot. So we started to restrict the interviews to publications that gave her solid footage. It worked out quite well. She got a lot of a coverage.”63

  More coverage than any other UNICEF ambassador before or since. That convinced her to be even better prepared and to write all her own speeches. As her conscientiousness increased, so did her impact. She told a Congressional subcommittee:

  “In Ethiopia, I went to the orphanage in Mecalee ... five hundred children, whose parents died in the drought of 1985 ... which is run by Father Chasade of the Catholic Church. It was he who in desperation said, ‘If you can’t send me food for my children, then send me the spades to dig their graves.’ ”64

  UNICEF, she said dramatically, chose to send the food.

  “There is a science of war, but how strange that there isn’t a science of peace,” she declared, paraphrasing Maria Montessori. “There are colleges of war; why can’t we study peace?”65 She articulated that more passionately in replying to a question about how Ethiopia had affected her personally:I have a broken heart. I feel desperate. I can’t stand the idea that two million people are in imminent danger of starving to death, many of them children, [and] not because there isn’t tons of food sitting in the northern port of Shoa. It can’t be distributed. Last spring, Red Cross and UNICEF workers were ordered out of the northern provinces because of two simultaneous civil wars....

  I went into rebel country and saw mothers and their children who had walked for ten days, even three weeks, looking for food, settling onto the desert floor into makeshift camps where they may die. Horrible. That image is too much for me. The “Third World” is a term I don’t like very much, because we’re all one world. I want people to know that the largest part of humanity is suffering, that starvation exists even in a wealthy country like America—which is scandalous, a true disgrace.... 66

  I think that, today, never has there been more suffering in more places all at once. At the same time, never has there been so much hope. We’ve had the greatest gift mankind could possibly give to children, which is “The Convention on the Rights of the Child.” Two hundred and fifty thousand children die every week—last week, next week—and nobody really talks about it. It’s the greatest shame and tragedy of our t
imes. And it must Stop.67

  The Convention on the Rights of the Child was based on the “Declaration on the Rights of the Child,” proclaimed by the UN in 1959, calling on all nations to guarantee children’s rights to health, education and protection in time of war. It was to be adopted into national legislation everywhere. She talked it up wherever she went and confronted the cynicism head on. In New Zealand, for instance, a patronizing interviewer praised its idealism but doubted that politicians could ever be convinced to care and do something about it.

  “If you and I are convinced, they’re going to be convinced too,” she shot back. “Somebody said to me the other day, ‘You know, it’s really senseless, what you’re doing. There’s always been suffering, there will always be suffering, and you’re just prolonging the suffering of these children [by rescuing them].’ My answer is, ‘Okay, then, let’s start with your grandchild. Don’t buy antibiotics if it gets pneumonia. Don’t take it to the hospital if it has an accident.’ It’s against life—against humanity—to think that way.”68

  THE SECOND JOURNEY: TURKEY—AUGUST 1988

  Hepburn’s next trip, to Turkey, coincided with an international children’s festival there and a shift in UNICEF’s agenda from food to health. The priority in Turkey was immunization against the six main child-killing diseases: measles, tuberculosis, tetanus, whooping cough, diphtheria and polio. UNICEF and the World Health Organization had set a joint goal of universal child immunization by 1990, and their high-gear efforts were now saving three million young lives each year.

  Audrey called Turkey “the most lovely example” of UNICEF’s ability to provide brilliant organizational skills in partnership with cooperative nations:

  “We notified the government that their infant mortality was very high. The Turkish government sent a group to New York to study the program we had completed in Colombia. The group went back, and a total immunization program was planned in four months. The Turkish president and prime minister went on TV, the school teachers spoke from their desks, and the imams from their pulpits. The army gave us their trucks, the fishmongers gave their wagons for the vaccines, and once the date was set, it took ten days to vaccinate the whole country. Not bad.”69