by Barry Paris
Not bad at all. Good consolation for the local TV programming in Ankara. “Because it was a state visit, they had an Audrey Hepburn festival,” Rob Wolders recalls. “One night we turned on the television, and there was My Fair Lady. I had never seen it and was looking forward to it. But it was in Turkish. The combination of Audrey speaking in Turkish and Marni Nixon singing was too much. I had to turn it off.”
THE THIRD JOURNEY: SOUTH AMERICA—OCTOBER 1988
Street children and education were the focus of her South American tour a few months later. In Venezuela and Ecuador, she later told Congress, “I saw tiny mountain communities, slums, and shantytowns receive water systems for the first time by some miracle—and the miracle is UNICEF. ”I watched boys build their own schoolhouse with bricks and cement provided by UNICEF.“70
Most intently, she studied projects designed to aid children living on the street. That situation appalled her as much as it did Roger Moore, her friend and fellow UNICEF colleague (she had helped to recruit him), who was now viewing the far worse “violence of neglect” in Brazil. “First they ignored the street kids,” said Moore, “and now they’ve started killing them.”
He had met thirteen-year-old prostitutes, living in the streets, who used the money they earned to buy toys. So relentlessly grim was his report that he felt obliged not to end it on a totally depressing note: “I get one dollar a year for this—a whole dollar—but I have to wait a year to get it. UNICEF is receiving that interest on that dollar, you realize.”71
Audrey found it harder to leaven her remarks with humor. Her ferocity could be frightening. When she learned something shocking, she demanded that the world learn it, too. “Do you know how many street children there are in South America?” she would later ask in New York. “All over the world? ... But especially in South America and India? It’s something like a hundred million who live and die in the streets.”72
THE FOURTH JOURNEY: CENTRAL AMERICA—FEBRUARY 1989
She had met many dignitaries on her previous trips but had not been drafted for “summit meetings” until now, on the most upbeat UNICEF journey she ever made, in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. In Central America—while Colonel Oliver North covertly stoked Nicaragua’s Contra war with arms from Iran—Audrey pleaded the case for children in many forums, but most remarkably in a series of meetings with the chief executives of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala.
“¡Bienvenida Audrey Hepburn,” read hand-lettered signs all along the way, “los niños te saludan!” (Welcome—the children salute you!) She was everywhere at once, it seemed, weighing babies at a new maternal-care clinic, turning on the spigot for the first time at a mountain village’s water project, handing out press awards for excellence in covering children’s issues in Tegucigalpa. No frown troubles her features in the documentary footage—just joyous scenes of gorgeous, fairly healthy and happy children, whom she snatches up for hugs.
In flawless Spanish, she delivered a lovely message on breast-feeding to the television cameras: “Soy Audrey Hepburn. Soy madre. La leche materna es el mejor regalo que una madre puede dar a su hijo. Es para toda la vida. ”cb
The “summits” went flawlessly, as well. She charmed the presidential pants off Honduras’s Jose Azcona Hoya and Guatemala’s Roberto Carpio. Most touching was her meeting with Salvador’s ailing President Napoleon Duarte, who died shortly afterward.
Having accomplished all that, she got the kind of reward she liked best: a private evening with Rob, her UNICEF companion Teresa Albanez, and her photographer-godchild, Victoria Brynner, Doris’ daughter. Together they all attended a gathering in San Salvador, where Audrey sang and played the guitar with a group of local musicians. When the party was over, the adoring minstrels followed her outside and kept on singing. “They were still serenading her as we were driving off,” says Wolders. “So much love for Audrey there.”
Victoria Brynner grew up with Audrey and often photographed her, but never “officially.” This was “a great opportunity for me to be with her in the context of her work,” says Brynner, “and to watch her deal not only with the suffering people in the field but with all the UNICEF officials, the governments, the media, constantly bouncing from one to the other. It was so impressive to see how giving and patient she always was.”
After one wrenching inspection of Quito’s most poverty-stricken areas, the two women stopped into the magnicifent La Compañía church. “We stood there next to each other and held hands and each said our own little prayer,” Victoria recalls. “After what we’d just seen, it was very moving. A few months later, on my birthday, she came to our house with a little basket, and in the basket was a bird’s nest she had found in her garden, and in the bird’s nest was a little hand-painted paper bird, and under the bird was an unbelievable cross set with diamonds and rubies. The card said it was for that moment we spent in the church in Quito. I have worn it every single day.“73
As AN INSPECTOR in the field, the lady of fashion dressed down and traveled light: Two suitcases and a carry-on held all the jeans, sneakers, sweatshirts and Lacoste pullovers she required. For UNICEF, as for Gardens of the World, she pressed her own clothes in the hotels, did her own hair and makeup, and never made a late entrance. On the road, she needed no one to hold her hand, literally or figuratively, except Rob.
As a lobbyist in Washington, D.C., however, she reverted to type—and to nerves. On April 6, 1989, smartly attired in a sleeveless black Karl Lagerfeld dress, she was jittery, clinging to the arm of U.S. UNICEF Committee President Lawrence Bruce as she entered a Capitol conference room to testify before the House Select Subcommittee on Hunger.
As John Isaac had told her early on, UNICEF spokesmen were in a tricky position because they could not take political stands. But in the bellicose Reagan-Bush eighties, politics and economics were at the heart of most human disasters worldwide and could hardly be ignored. Walking that tightrope, the UN staff had devised the idea of a “1 percent for Development Fund” and was now trying to sell it to the world community. Audrey was one of its first and greatest saleswomen:
“Less than one-half of one percent of today’s world economy would be the total required to alleviate the worst aspects of poverty and would meet basic human needs over the next ten years,” she told the congressmen. “We cannot ignore the economic issues that have made the 1980s into a decade of despair....
“The heaviest burden of a decade of frenzied borrowing is falling not on the military nor on those foreign bank accounts nor on those who conceived the years of waste, but on the poor who are having to do without the bare necessities.... When the impact becomes visible in the rising death rates among children, then what has happened is simply an outrage against a large section of humanity. Nothing can justify it.... The burden of debt must be lifted to a degree where the developing countries can cope with debt repayment.”74
It costs $5 to vaccinate a child for life, six cents to prevent death from dehydration, and eighty-four cents a year to stop a child from going blind. “How is it that governments spend so much on warfare and bypass the needs of their children, their greatest capital, their only hope for peace?”75
It was a strong political stand, carefully worded. UNICEF, she went on, was the one international organization with the infrastructure and diplomatic leverage to channel aid directly to children and not through governments.
When she finished, UNICEF executive director Jim Grant spoke bluntly to the committee of Audrey’s import to the cause:
“At the heart of whether we succeed is public opinion.... It isn’t the question of funding anymore. In the Sudan, it’s public opinion that is going to keep the pressure on the two sides to allow the supplies to move.... Ms. Hepburn will be going to Sudan next week to keep world public attention on it. [With her,] we have a new capacity to talk to people. Television picks up a picture in the Sudan and says, ‘Ms. Hepburn is there ... children are dying but there is still time to do something about it.’ Last fall, the media weren�
��t able to get in there. Then, you saw only the bodies of the dead four months later.”76
It’s just a six-minute drive from the Capitol to the White House, but a much greater distance psychologically. After her congressional appearance, Audrey and Rob were invited to a state dinner there for Israeli Prime Minister Shamir. “Bush was very considerate,” Rob recalls. “He put Audrey on his left.”
He was doing himself a favor, of course. But it gave Audrey a perfect chance to speak with him about what mattered to her. When she mentioned her forthcoming “emergency” trip to Sudan, he introduced her to Cable News Network’s Bernard Shaw and suggested that his network ought to cover it. (Bush was an avid CNN fan.) Before leaving, Audrey arranged to come back for a private chat with the woman of the house, as Barbara Bush remembers:Audrey came to call on me the next day to talk about her work with UNICEF. I had met her once before in Rome at a luncheon when George was vice president. Audrey felt passionately about two things, both of which mattered to me also: She loved children and became an advocate for young people in distress around the world; and she adored dogs.... She played with Millie’s puppies, and I was slightly surprised that Millie let her pick them up without even a small protest.... How the world admired that lovely creature!77
THE FIFTH JOURNEY: SUDAN—APRIL 1988
Just days after that White House visit, Hepburn and Wolders found themselves in Sudan to witness the start of a miraculous UNICEF-sponsored relief effort called “Operation Lifeline.”
“Sudan is an outpost of despair, but it has astounding beauty,” Rob recalls. “I remember Audrey looking down from the plane at where the Blue Nile and the White Nile branch out and saying she had this great feeling of gladness. It’s wrong to think we’d go to a place like that and immediately be immersed in misery. There was a period of assimilation.”
UNICEF’s Jim Grant had been appointed special envoy to the Sudan and was largely responsible for the negotiations that led to Operation Lifeline. Its goal was to ferry food to southern Sudan, which was cut off from all aid because of the civil war. Audrey and Rob watched the first ship with food and medical supplies leave Khartoum for Kosti on the Nile.
The next day, while visiting a remote Sudanese refugee camp, Audrey noticed a fourteen-year-old boy lying on a dirt floor and asked what was wrong with him. The answer was terribly familiar: acute anemia, respiratory problems and edema, due to malnutrition. “That was exactly the same way I finished the war—that age, with those three things,” she said, noting that even when fed, starving children often never recover from the neurological damage. “I thought, how strange to hear those same three things. But it was also a moment of glory for me, because just then a big UNICEF truck came by full of food and medicine.”78
Be it famine in Ethiopia, civil war in El Salvador, or ethnic massacre in the Sudan, “I saw but one glaring truth: These are not natural disasters but manmade tragedies for which there is only one manmade solution—peace.” Just in the past month of this most brutal civil war, “20,000 starving orphan boys have fled from the Sudan into Ethiopia,” she said. “Many of them never make it. They either die of hunger on the way [or] drown in the river which divides the Sudan from Ethiopia.”79
In the Sudan, with Rob’s help, she would again employ her “summit” skills, as Wolders relates:
“There was a meeting arranged for Audrey, me and Sadique, the man in power, who didn’t usually deal with UN people. But he wanted to see Audrey, and he was gracious to her. It was our intention to go to the refugee camp in El Mereim, where 16,000 people had died. Sadique sent his minister of health along with us, and we got to an area just on the border with the Christian south. From there we were supposed to go with the Moslem minister of health into rebel country, the city of Juba, which was totally surrounded by government troops. But they said they couldn’t guarantee safety and they made us go back to Khartoum.
“It was very frustrating. We said we were willing to take a chance, but the UN officials overruled us. So rather than go home with our tail between our legs, we got a Red Cross plane to fly us from Khartoum to Nairobi—a night flight over Uganda—and then they sent one of rebel leaders to Kenya to fly us back into Sudan. It illustrated Audrey’s determination. Without that corps of journalists along, we could speak our minds more bluntly to the leaders there, and we did. It produced some results.
“Some places we went to over the years were run-of-mill, but this was one of the truly exotic places we’d heard about as children—Khartoum. We smuggled in a bottle of scotch, by the way, since it was a Moslem country.”
SOMETIMES it got to her. “If everybody just decided to do something about it, we wouldn’t be here talking about it,” she said in frustration. She had to reinvent the wheel constantly—as at the Canberra Press Club, where the question was, “What do you really do for UNICEF?”
“My task is to inform, to create awareness of the needs of children,” she replied politely, as if for the first time. “It would be nice to be an expert on education, economics, politics, religions, traditions and cultures. I’m none of those. But I am a mother and will travel.”80 UNICEF had only 2,000 paid employees, she said. It consisted mostly of volunteers, such as herself. “I fly around the world on tickets donated by airlines, stay in hotels free of charge—in great luxury, I might add.”
It was a rueful inside joke at UNICEF that people so often congratulated her for her work with UNESCO. Over and over, she explained the difference between the two organizations, chiefly that “UNICEF has no permanent allocation. We get no funds from the UN. By definition, we are a fund, not an agency.”81
Hepburn provided a phenomenal boost to the fund-raising campaigns of the national UNICEF committees everywhere. Also, every year between 1988 and 1992, she hosted with Roger Moore the Danny Kaye International Children’s Special in Holland, which was broadcast worldwide and drew enormous donations.
“Jim Grant told me they got $1 million in contributions every time she made an appeal on Barbara Walters or wherever,” says John Isaac. “She made such a huge impression.”
Isaac and Hepburn had become important figures in each other’s lives by then. After their Ethiopia trip, she had written to say how much she enjoyed traveling with him and the photos he had taken. She now told him Bangladesh was her next choice for a UNICEF visit, and she wanted him to come with her.
THE SIXTH JOURNEY: BANGLADESH—OCTOBER 1989
“Everybody was calling Bangladesh ‘a basket case,’ ” Isaac says, “because of the constant mishaps they had with floods, famine—you name it. But when everybody else was throwing up their hands, Audrey said, ‘I want to go there and be with them and promote their cause.’ I thought that was amazing.”
Together, he and Audrey and Rob first visited projects for poor children in Bangkok, then quickly moved on to Bangladesh.
“She traveled to every little corner,” Isaac recalls. “In one town, she leaned over to me and said, ‘John, do these people know or care who I am?’ I said, ‘You’d be surprised.’ As we were talking, I heard this one man say to another, ‘I think that is Miss Hepburn.’ When I told her that, she turned around and asked, ‘Do you know me?’ The guy said, ‘I have seen Roman Holiday ten times!’ In the middle of Bangladesh!
“Often the kids would have flies all over them, but she would just go hug them. I had never seen that. Other people had a certain amount of hesitation, but she would just grab them. Children would just come up to hold her hand, touch her—she was like the Pied Piper.”
Cole Dodge was the UNICEF representative in Bangladesh, and it was his job to show Audrey and Rob the health-related projects connected to UNICEF. At one stop, he recalls, a crowd surrounded Audrey—as always—when she stepped from her car:
“She smiled at the children, and some of them came forward to stroke her arm and hold her hands as we walked through the village. To the side of the path, just ahead, a small girl sat by herself under the shade of a coconut tree. The little one caught Audrey’s att
ention, and she asked, ‘Why doesn’t she join the others?’ Walking over, Audrey knelt down and spoke with her. Then, picking her up, she hugged her close. The child’s legs, crippled by polio, dangled uselessly. Carrying the little one, Audrey walked towards us, her eyes filled with tears. None of the rest of us had taken notice of that child.”82
A few weeks later, back in the United States on Larry King Live, a caller asked, “How do we know when we send money that it actually gets there?”
“I know it gets there because I’ve seen the results,” she said. “UNICEF money goes straight to projects and never to governments.83 I just came back from Bangladesh [where] contaminated water is the biggest killer of children. In the last eight years, we have sunk 250,000 tube wells there.... It’s not enough to know there’s been a flood in Bangladesh and 7,000 people lost their lives. Why the flood? What is their history? How are they going to survive?”84
Isaac was most struck by the fact that, at any given moment, “she dealt only with what she was doing. Audrey had no color, no race. She went to Bangladesh at a time when the main crisis was over, but it was still an ongoing thing. ‘I want people to be reminded,’ she said. Today, we forget what happened yesterday with all the satellite technology. Today you are here, tomorrow there, the next day, somewhere else. How soon people forget the previous tragedy. But she never did.”