Audrey Hepburn Read online

  Her widowed grandfather, the old Baron, was now living with his eldest daughter Mies back at Zijpendaal Castle. Ella, Audrey and the boys stayed there briefly before finding their own apartment in Arnhem’s Sonsbeek area. With no support from Hepburn-Ruston, Ella turned her attention to money and discovered that most of her inheritance was gone—frittered away by herself or her ex-husband? No one ever quite knew.26 But that was a relatively minor disaster. She was terribly relieved at having brought her family to Arnhem, certain that it was the safest place to be.

  “Famous last words,” mused Audrey.27

  ARNHEM is a typical Gelderland town whose surrounding landscape is a mix of quaint villages, castles, lovely woods and meadows. Nature and geography were good to it in all respects but one: It is situated just twelve miles from the German border.

  Civilization in and around Arnhem is ancient, dating to a Roman fortress there in the second century A.D. Urban Arnhem began in 893 and, from 1312 on, its citizens and Guild Masters played an active role in governing the city. In the fifteenth century it became the capital of the province of Gelderland. The English poet and war hero Philip Sidney fought for Dutch independence from Spain, was killed and is buried in Arnhem. The great Eusebius Church was a late-Gothic wonder; its striking eight-sided tower was Arnhem’s chief landmark from 1560 to 1944, when it was destroyed in the last and worst foreign occupation.

  By the mid-nineteenth century many Dutch people who had grown rich in the East Indies colonies moved to the Arnhem area, and living there became fashionable for such upper-class families as the van Heemstras. Baron Aernoud was elected burgomaster, but during his tenure, in 1911, the Arnhemse Courant saw fit to attack him for saying Arnhem’s future was as “a luxury town,” failing to mention its development as a shipping and trade center. Under leadership like his, said the paper, Arnhem would end up a ghost town.

  That teapot tempest was long forgotten by 1939. Others had taken up the old Baron’s slack, and he was now just an elder in retirement. The “new” Arnhem had an industrial purpose, indeed, in which the transportation of people and goods by river was most essential. Arnhem’s first bridge over the Rhine had been constructed in 1603. Its newest, most spectacular span had just been completed in 1935—a sleek commercial convenience to which no one, at the moment, attached much larger significance.

  Certainly not Ella, who had concerns of her own. In December 1939, she packed up her possessions and her children and moved from Sonsbeek to a modest terrace house at 7 Sickeslaan. She was also busy commuting to a part-time job with Panders, an exclusive interior-design company in the Hague. She enrolled Audrey in the fifth form of the Tamboersbosje (Drummer’s Wood) public school. But the girl’s Dutch at that point was primitive, and her fluent English a potentially dangerous liability in a town so close to the German border:

  “My mother was worried about [my] speaking English in the streets with Germans all around.” To make her appear more Dutch, Ella had enrolled her under van Heemstra instead of Hepburn. For Audrey, the surname made no difference. She hated being “in a huge classroom not knowing a word that was being said and every time I opened my mouth, everyone roaring with laughter. 28 The first morning in school, I sat at my little bench, completely baffled. For several days I went home weeping. But ... I was forced to learn the language quickly. And I did.”29

  Years later, when asked if she felt more Dutch or English, she said she leaned toward English “because I was more English than Dutch when I went to Holland” in 1939. But little by little, as she learned the language and discovered her family in the Netherlands, “my Dutch roots were reborn.”30

  Her social life was limited, but it did exist, thanks to her mother’s involvement in the Christian Science church, located in the local Masonic Temple. David Heringa was living just outside Arnhem in late 1939, when he and several other teens were asked to come to Sunday school because a new girl “needed kids who could speak English.” Arnhem’s Christian Science community was small—perhaps thirty families. Heringa remembers a “very quiet” ten-year-old “whose mother came to our house in Velp to practice reading the Scripture and Science and Health.”31c

  Ella was also involved with the local arts council, but there is no truth to the claim that she was president of something called the British-Netherlands Society in Arnhem or even that such a society existed. Her cultural activity centered on the stage—and not just the audience side of the footlights. She gave one public reading of a poem entitled “Daughter,” to which Audrey listened proudly in the balcony of the Arnhem Theater. And at an amateur theatrical there in late 1939, Ella and her children appeared together in an elaborate Mozart tableau with eighteenth-century costumes, stage decor and music.

  As a very small girl, Audrey had been taken to several ballet performances in Brussels and had declared her intention to become a ballerina. But the older she got, the more she disliked what she saw in the mirror: Ballerinas were slender with perfect features. She was chubby. She thought her eyes were too big. She hated her irregular teeth. “I had an enormous complex about my looks,” she said. “I thought I was ugly and I was afraid nobody would ever marry me.”32 But the desire to dance stayed with her, rekindled by her lessons in Kent. There are reports that she briefly attended a high school in Arnhem, but no proof. Others say she was privately tutored. Either way, upon entering puberty, she was far more interested in ballet than school.

  Audrey’s serious ballet training began at age twelve, in 1941, under Winja Marova at the Arnhem School of Music. Billed as “the former Russian ballerina,” Marova was in fact a good Dutch lady named Winnie Koopman, who was married to the school’s director, Douwe Draaisma, and had romanticized her professional name. Audrey would slim down and study with her through the summer of 1944, becoming her star pupil in the process, as Marova recalled:She was long, slender, very sweet, very eager to learn, and obsessed with dancing. She was willing to give everything for it. She was very musical. I always enjoyed teaching her. She just took everything you told her. At her first performance, I could see how good she was. When she was on stage, even though she just knew a little bit, you immediately saw that a flame lit the audience.

  “Pavlova was my ideal,” she said years later, but “Winja was the first [dancer] I really got to know and could call a friend. She was a beautiful world-class dancer [and she] helped this very young girl in Arnhem to believe that she could become one, too.33 I was going to be a ballerina. I was very fanatic about it.”34

  Ella supported her—powerfully. “She was always at the rehearsals and stood behind the curtains during a performance,” says Carel Johan Wensink, who often played the piano for Audrey’s lessons with Marova. “Her mother had hair on her teeth!”—a fine Dutch vulgarism for something like “too much chutzpah.”

  She was a stage mother, all right, but not a stereotypical one. After one modest poetry reading and a Mozart tableau, Ella never again sought the limelight herself. Age and aristocratic reticence finally vanquished the private longing. From now on, full energy and attention were diverted to the little dancing daughter who was almost—but not quite—a prodigy.

  THE SADLER’S WELLS BALLET was the most stellar company in England. Before, during and after the war, its choreography—by Frederick Ashton—was on the cutting edge. Director Ninette de Valois presided over a close-knit company of brilliant dancers, headed by Margot Fonteyn (who joined at age fourteen) and Robert Helpmann, the greatest mime of his era.

  On May 4, 1940, nine months after the outbreak of World War II, the Sadler’s Wells embarked on a courageous goodwill tour of Holland, Belgium and France. Under the auspices of the British Council, the trip was intended to boost morale in those jittery countries. Its patron, Lord Esher, had one unsettling caveat: “I hope that they may get there before Hitler does.”35

  Annabel Farjeon, a twenty-one-year-old corps member, kept a diary of that journey, starting with Bobby Helpmann’s anxiety about his newly waved hair. “If the ship gets hit,” he declare
d, “I shall swim breaststroke, with my head well back. I could never look the Dutch in the face if my perm got wet and went into a frizz, like one of those cheap ten-shilling do’s.”

  Their Dutch home base was The Hague, from which the young troupe would sally forth in busses to the smaller towns and return each night. The company’s first performance took place May 6 at the Hague’s Theatre Royal. The next day they traveled to the industrial town of Hengelo, about seven miles from the German border. “It was swarming with spies and Nazi supporters,” wrote Farjeon. People in the streets spat and jeered, “Ingleesh! Leepstickleepstick!” Ninette de Valois wanted to send the younger girls back to The Hague, but the road was temporarily blocked. “The knowledge that our retreat was cut off intensified the excitement,” Farjeon recorded. “The brothel scene of ‘Rake’s Progress’ was at its most vulgar, with Helpmann mouthing lewd remarks to conductor Constant Lambert.”

  The following night’s venue was the huge Philips Electronics factory in Eindhoven. The next day, Thursday, May 9, it was Arnhem—where Farjeon wandered about, unimpressed: “Along the river stood opulent houses with gardens down to the water, where wealthy Dutchmen retired for their well-fed old age, streets strewn with rubbish, dirty children playing in the gutter, and the smell of drains.”36

  A mile away, in a better part of the town, eleven-year-old Audrey Hepburn was excitedly anticipating the performance:

  “For the occasion, my mother had our little dressmaker make me a long taffeta dress. I remember it so well. I’d never had a long dress in my life. There was a little round collar, a little bow here, and a little button in front. All the way to the ground, and it rustled. The reason she got me this, at great expense—we couldn’t afford this kind of thing—was that I was to present a bouquet of flowers at the end of the performance to Ninette de Valois, the director of the company.”37

  The Sadler’s Wells program that night at Arnhem’s City Theater featured “Horoscope,” a tale of young lovers ruled by the zodiac; and “Facade,” Ashton’s great comic ballet, with music by William Walton and an all-star cast of Fonteyn, Helpmann, Pamela May and Michael Somes. The audience was enthralled—none more so than Baroness van Heemstra and her daughter. Ella, who had helped arrange the company’s visit, took the opportunity to deliver an extended thank-you speech first in Dutch, then in English, after which Audrey was summoned to present her bouquet to de Valois. If the presentation was especially touching, no one but the girl and her mother felt it at the time.

  “A little kid brought some flowers,” says company member Jane Edgeworth. “Just a nice little girl, like hundreds of other little girls, who wanted to study the ballet.”38

  The performance was followed by a supper and more of “those dull speeches that officials love to make,” Annabel Farjeon noted. “The town was black and empty when we came out for the journey back to The Hague. Trucks which had lined the road the previous night [were] now rumbling toward the German frontier filled with soldiers and guns.”

  Earlier that day on the way into Arnhem, company member Elizabeth Kennedy saw felled trees all along the roadside: “.They had the trees cut, and so they closed the roads by pushing the trees across as we passed. They were expecting an invasion.”39 Shortly after the company left Arnhem—around midnight—all roads into and out of the town were closed. “It was lucky that we had not dawdled longer and been trapped,” says Farjeon.d

  Hepburn folklore holds that the Sadler’s Wells company fled Arnhem in panic that night, to the sound of bombs, “ten minutes” before the Germans crossed the Rhine and turned the town into a battlefield. In fact, there was no streetfighting in Arnhem that night—or for the next four years. But just three hours later, at three a.m. on May 10, the Germans indeed crossed into Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg—and Arnhem was one of their first stops.

  “There was no noise,” says Paul Vroemen, an Arnhem boy of eight at the time. “My dad switched on the radio at about five a.m. and they said planes were bombing Rotterdam, Amsterdam and The Hague with no declaration of war. The first Germans who arrived in Arnhem passed our house about nine-thirty in the morning—three soldiers, well-equipped, in camouflage jackets. Just three. An hour later came lots of troops, artillery and infantry.”e

  Audrey recalled the disbelief and confusion on which the Germans capitalized :All civilians were ordered to remain indoors and to close their shutters, and we were warned not to look out of the windows. Naturally, we all peeped.... It was uncannily strange. In an invasion, one expects fighting; but there was no fighting. We saw the grey uniforms of the German soldiers on foot. They all held machine-guns and marched in looking spick-and-span and disciplined; then came the rumble of trucks—and the next thing we knew was that they had taken complete charge of the town.40

  May 10, not coincidentally, was momentous in England as well. During the “Phony War” of late 1939 and early 1940, British air minister Kingsley Wood had refused to authorize air raids against German munitions factories on the grounds that they were “private property”! For such idiocy, and the Holland invasion’s proof of it, the government now fell. On the evening of May 10, Neville Chamberlain resigned and the king sent for Churchill.

  Thousands of men, women and children were burned or buried alive and 11,000 buildings destroyed in the barbaric Nazi firebombing of Rotterdam.f General H. G. Winkelman, the Dutch commander-in-chief, had planned to give up northern and eastern Holland and hold out for reinforcements from England and France. But the wild, wishful rumors of British war vessels and troops rushing to the defense of Holland were false.41 The small Dutch army fought bravely, inflicting heavy casualties on the Germans especially around The Hague, where Nazi paratroopers were rushing to capture the queen. Feisty Wilhelmina reportedly told her secretary to shoot her if necessary to prevent her from falling into Hitler’s hands.

  But the situation was quite hopeless. Had Winkelman’s forces continued to resist, Rotterdam’s destruction would have been followed by similar attacks on Amsterdam and other cities. Three days after the invasion, the queen and her ministers left for London—as bitterly disappointing to the Germans as it then was to the Dutch. Two days later, to spare more carnage, Winkelman capitulated. Holland had been crushed in five days.

  In the despair of the moment, many castigated the queen for her flight, but others thought her wise and pointed out that the king of Belgium—who stayed—was just a hapless prisoner of war. Soon enough, she would begin her new job as the symbol of Dutch Resistance. When Radio Orange made its broadcast debut from London in July, Wilhelmina delivered the inaugural speech. Hers was a captive audience in every way, and she exhorted them forward to liberation. From then on, whenever Radio Orange announced a speech of the queen, all Holland knew and listened—the extended van Heemstra family included.

  From childhood, Ella had known the queen slightly and always found her more stiff than inspirational. But nowadays, Ella and her children cheered with the rest of Holland “when the old girl used the rude word moffen for Germans [or] called Dutch Nazis lummels (nitwits).”42 Listening to Radio Orange was strictly forbidden, and at the end of each broadcast, it was Audrey’s job to turn the dial elsewhere in case of any surprise inspection.

  After the capitulation, Dutch officials were forced to release all imprisoned members of the Dutch Nazi Movement (Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging, or NSB), who now became the country’s hated ruling class. But by and large, the first weeks went by with no rampant murder or pillaging, and by June, rail connections, mail service, and telephones were restored.

  “The Germans tried to be civil and to win our hearts,” Audrey remembered. “The first few months we didn’t know quite what had happened.... A child is a child is a child, [and] I just went to school.”43

  Vroemen, too, recalls life during the occupation as “quite normal” at first: “Life went on, though the rations were getting lower and lower. We had football and swimming matches, we went to the movies—not American or British, only German, of cours
e, lots of propaganda and films of the victorious German army.

  Holland had been a part of the historic Holy Roman Reich, or Empire, and the Dutch were given a chance to prove “willing” to rejoin it. They would not be crushed like the Poles and others. Germans did not take over civil authority; stamps were not, as elsewhere, imprinted with the words “Occupied Territory.”

  Soon enough, however, the brutal truth was that half a million German soldiers were being fed, clothed and paid from Dutch resources. Civilians were required to “board” soldiers for ten Dutch cents per night, and the country’s riches were fully exploited for the German war machine. A partial list of the immense wealth stolen from the Netherlands and sent to Germany included virtually all Dutch tea, coffee, butter, vegetable oils, fruit and woolen goods. In 1940, the entire apple harvest was requisitioned by Germany, along with fourteen million of twenty-two million chickens and most of the cattle.

  By spring of 1941, it was hard to get the single weekly egg to which rationing entitled everyone, let alone meat. By summer there was no tea or coffee left at all. Most dire was the fuel shortage: In the freezing winter, only one room per home was allowed to be heated. Entire woods disappeared. The death rate for children from cold and malnutrition soared 40 percent over that in 1939.44

  Like everyone else, the van Heemstras had little food or heat, and—like everyone else—no choice but to endure. The Germans even confiscated bicycles. Insult to many injuries was the “personal identification card” which people now had to carry. Pre-invasion Holland had been the least-regimented state in Europe. In occupied Holland, Audrey was learning a harsh discipline very different from that of ballet.

  But she was still learning ballet, too—with the help or hindrance of Ella’s intense hovering. “Her mother was very dominant—a real ballet mother,” says Winja Marova, “and the other girls didn’t like it. They were also jealous, because Audrey was always the one that was mentioned.”