About the Book
About the Author
Also by Donald Spoto
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
1. 1929–1939
2. 1939–1946
3. 1947–1951
4. 1951
5. 1952
6. 1953
7. 1954
8. 1955–1956
9. 1957
10. January–June 1958
11. July 1958–December 1960
12. 1961–1962
13. 1963–1965
14. 1966–1970
15. 1971–1986
16. 1987–1990
17. 1991–1993
Picture Section
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
for
Ole Flemming Larsen
‘. . . right next to the right one . . . ’
Tim Christensen,
Danish Composer and Lyricist
Section One:
1. Audrey in 1939. © Lady Manon van Suchtelen. Courtesy of Joke Quarles van Ufford.
2. As Natasha in War and Peace, 1955. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
3. Audrey in 1938. Credit unknown.
4. Dance recital in Holland, 1943. © Courtesy of the British Film Institute.
5. With her mother, the Baroness Ella van Heemstra, 1945. Credit unknown.
6. At a London rehearsal, with Babs Johnson, 1948. Credit unknown.
7. In Sauce Piquante, London, 1950. © Courtesy of the British Film Institute.
8. As Eve Lester, in Young Wives’ Tale (1950), with Helen Cherry, Nigel Patrick and Derek Farr. © Courtesy of the British Film Institute.
9. With James Hanson, 1952. © Courtesy of the British Film Institute.
10. Relaxing with Gregory Peck, during Roman Holiday, 1952. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
11. With director Billy Wilder and Humphrey Bogart, filming Sabrina, 1953. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
12. With William Holden, in Sabrina, 1953. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
13. With director King Vidor, cinematographer Jack Cardiff and co-star Henry Fonda: War and Peace, 1955. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
14. With Mel Ferrer in War and Peace. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
15. Rehearsing the ballroom sequence for War and Peace. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
16. With Fred Astaire, during filming of Funny Face, 1956. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
17. As Jo Stockton in Funny Face. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
18. With producer Henry Blanke, novelist Kathryn Hulme, screenwriter Robert Anderson and director Fred Zinnemann, planning The Nun’s Story in 1957. © Courtesy of Robert Anderson.
Section Two:
19. As Gabrielle van der Mal/Sister Luke, in The Nun’s Story, 1958. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
20. Filming The Nun’s Story in the Belgian Congo. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
21. With Peter Finch. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
22. With Mel Ferrer, preparing Green Mansions, 1958. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
23. Singing ‘Moon River,’ in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 1960. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
24. Filming the opening sequence of My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison, 1963. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
25. With director George Cukor: the embassy ball sequence of My Fair Lady. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
26. With Albert Finney, while filming Two for the Road, 1966. Credit unknown.
27. With Andrea Dotti in Rome, 1972. © Courtesy of the British Film Institute.
28. With William Wyler (recipient of the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award) and actress Merle Oberon, Los Angeles, 1976. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
29. Seated between Robert Wolders and US Committee for UNICEF president Laurence Bruce, Jr., transporting grain to Tigre, Ethiopia, 1988. © UNICEF/HQ88-0900/John Isaac.
30. With children in Vietnam, 1990. © UNICEF/HQ90-0081/Peter Charlesworth.
31. At a UNICEF-sponsored health-care centre in Honduras, 1989. © UNICEF/HQ89-0231/Horst Cerni.
32. With a dying child in Somalia, 1992. © UNICEF/HQ92-1199/Betty Press.
33. As Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, 1963. © Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
THERE HAD BEEN bright sunshine when they left the English shore, but midway across the Channel, dark clouds swept overhead, and the wind had shifted from breezy to almost gale force. Now, as the ship headed for the Continent, they were suddenly caught in a late-winter storm. Cold rain whipped across the deck and stung their faces as the ferry rolled and pitched. But years later, the Baroness could not recall feeling any anxiety during the crossing, and therefore she had not communicated any fear to her two small boys as they steadied themselves against her.
This squall was far less threatening than the typhoon she had once endured in the South China Sea, nor was it as threatening as the violent conditions that routinely battered the ships that had taken her from Asia to South America or from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies. Thanks to the composure of the Dutch Baroness, her eight- and four-year-old sons could face the heavy weather cheerfully. But if she did not hold their hands tightly, the wind might easily sweep the children overboard. Better to take them inside for hot chocolate.
On her way to the ferry’s cafe, she passed her husband in the small, smoky lounge bar. Warming himself with Irish whisky, he glanced towards her but did not interrupt his conversation with a fellow passenger. Her husband was not the boys’ father – they were sons from her first marriage. And from his diffidence, no one in the room would have guessed that he had any connection to this handsome, patrician woman and her two docile children. She heard him tell his drinking partner that he had left England to take up a new position in Belgium with great prospects. Indeed, she hoped for the best, for him as for herself and the boys: if at last he could hold a job longer than a month or two without succumbing to indolence – well, that might help secure the marriage, too. He was her second husband, and they had been married for three years; during that entire time, she reckoned that he had not worked a total of three months.
Her first husband had jumped from the matrimonial ship five years after their wedding, which was just four years ago, and she was left with two small boys when she was twenty-five; now, domestic storm clouds were once again on the horizon. And she was seven months pregnant.
She had some financial resources and a share of ancestral property, for her family was of old European aristocracy. And she had a title: she was the Dutch Baroness Ella van Heemstra, now also Mrs Ruston. Dutch baronesses were not a rare breed even in 1929; most democratic Netherlanders did not mind the last of the noble gentry using venerable titles – but only if their holders adopted no airs and graces and imitated the Dutch royal family, an amiably down-to-earth clan.
The four travellers reached Brussels safely and proceeded to a rented house. There, with the help of a relative who arrived from Holland, the Baroness prepared for the child’s birth while her husband went off to his job with a British insurance company as a minor clerk with no confidential duties. He was bored from the first day.
On the morning of Saturday 4 May, the Baroness went into labour and by mid-afternoon she was nursing her newborn daughter. ‘Saturday’s child works hard for a living’ according to Mother Goose.
Ella Baroness van Heemstra was born in the fashionable Dutch suburb of Velp, near Arnheim, on 12 June 1900. One of nine children, she was the daughter of Baron Arnoud Jan Adolf van Heemstra (once the governor of Dutch Guiana in South America – later Surinam) and his wife, Baroness Elbrig Wilhemine Henrietta van Asbeck; both families were titled aristocrats. The precise reasons for the baronetcies remain unclear, but in each case both sets of Ella’s grandparents were respected jurists or judges with a long history of service to Crown and country. Their children, Ella’s parents, inherited the titles according to the custom of the time.
Ella’s childhood was not underprivileged: her parents owned a country mansion, a city house and a summer cottage, and they employed a small platoon of servants who attended them everywhere. Photos taken of her in her mid-twenties show a strikingly attractive woman with fine features, dark hair, a clear, translucent complexion and a certain dignified smile, neither girlish, coy nor seductive. She was, in other words, every bit the image of a somewhat Germanic-Victorian aristocrat, and it was, of course, the Germanic-Victorian style (overstuffed in furniture and formal in demeanour) that was the standard all over Europe – if not among the royal families, certainly among their social rivals, the landed gentry.
At the age of nineteen, Ella concluded a respectable but undemanding upper-class education, at which she excelled mostly at singing and amateur theatricals, to the point where she expressed a desire to become an opera singer. Her parents thought little of that and instead purchased her a first-class ticket on a long steamship journey to visit relatives who worked for Dutch colonial companies in Batavia – the Latin name for the Netherlands, later Jakarta – in the Dutch East Indies (later Indonesia).
There Ella blossomed and flourished. Much in demand for her fine voice – which she put to good use entertaining at parties – for her clever repartee and her air of sophistication, and for her genteel flirtatiousness, Ella impressed many eligible young men and their parents in the colonies. On 11 March 1920 – five months after her arrival and three months before her twentieth birthday – Ella’s parents travelled to Batavia for her marriage to Hendrik Gustaaf Adolf Quarles van Ufford, who was six years her senior and held a respectable job. Business was thriving that year in the Indies, at least partly because at home the Netherlands began to experience a severe depression and relied on the colonies more than ever.
Van Ufford’s mother was a baroness with a respected Dutch and French pedigree, and everything augured well for a happy and profitable union. On 5 December of that same year, Ella bore a son they named Arnoud Robert Alexander Quarles van Ufford (always known as Alex); and on 27 August 1924, they welcomed Ian Edgar Bruce Quarles van Ufford. But things soon went very wrong. When Hendrik returned to the Netherlands at Christmas 1924 to discuss a transfer from Batavia, Ella and the toddlers accompanied him. Early in 1925, she and her husband registered their divorce in Arnhem, for reasons that may forever remain unclear.
At once, van Ufford took ship for San Francisco, where (he said) he had a good offer of work; there, he soon met a German immigrant named Marie Caroline Rohde and was married forthwith. With that, Hendrik Quarles van Ufford withdraws from this story; the public record shows only that he returned to the Netherlands years later, where he died on 14 July 1955 at the age of sixty.
And so, that spring of 1925, the twenty-four-year-old Baroness Ella van Heemstra van Ufford was left with two babies and no husband. Her friends in Holland noted that she had become somewhat imperious, perhaps from defensiveness about the dissolution of her marriage, but she had a title, a Dutch home with her parents and a nanny for her sons.
These benefits notwithstanding, Ella surprised her parents by returning to Batavia, and there she renewed a friendship she had earlier formed with a dashing, courtly Englishman she had met even while her marriage was foundering. Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston, eleven years older than Ella, was born on 21 November 1889 in Onzic, Bohemia, where his London-born father, Victor John Ruston, had worked and where he had married a local girl named Anna Catherina Wels. Her maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Kathleen Hepburn.
When Joseph and Ella were reunited that spring of 1926, he was still wedded to Cornelia Wilhelmina Bisschop, a Dutchwoman he had married in the East Indies. They were living entirely on her family inheritance, which was certainly helpful, for Ruston never really had any sort of career – nor much of a desire for one. Later identified by Hepburn biographers as an Anglo-Irish banker, he was neither Irish nor a banker. ‘the sad truth is, he never really hung on to any job,’ according to one of his grandsons. But he had a calm manner, a handsome expression, dark eyes like velvet (Ella’s description) and, thanks to Cornelia, a fine wardrobe. He sported a little moustache like an artist’s brush, and he photographed well; it was not difficult to understand his appeal to Ella, who in any case was eager to find a new father for her boys.
Joseph found Ella cultivated, elegant and as enamoured of the good life as he, and they enjoyed attending cotillions, military parades, fine restaurants and sporting events. Cornelia, apparently complaisant and much on her own, luxuriated in the rarefied precincts of colonial life, with a home lavishly appointed in ivory and gold (common for the white Europeans), and there was no shortage of natives to look after their needs. Daily life among the wealthy could neatly be described in terms of a Somerset Maugham novel: the setting was not a dreary backwater outpost but a rather chic preserve for the few advantaged foreigners who controlled the economy. The direct rule by the Netherlands over the Dutch East Indies greatly expanded from 1900, and Dutch strategies to control both the economy and tax revenues meant that virtually every exported item was shipped through Batavia.
But for Joseph, Ella’s greatest appeal was her title – about which he joked so often that she recognised how seriously he took it. Never mind that the title was a centuries-old honorific used by other ladies in Batavia – and never mind that Ella took an office job to support herself and her boys. Joseph, besotted with all things that had a trace of the upper classes, took to introducing her as his friend the Baroness. At the same time, he understood that marriage would not promote him to a baronetcy; still, he greatly valued her background and breeding and, perhaps most of all, he saw her family’s affluence as a very comfortable cushion in life – indeed, as a plush settee on which he could, when so inclined, rest and relax. Which was most of the time.
When Joseph said he could obtain a speedy divorce from his wife, Ella accepted his proposal. Fortunately, Cornelia Bisschop Ruston made no objections, for she had romantic interests elsewhere. Papers were drawn up, signed and countersigned on all sides, there was a quick divorce, and on 7 September 1926, Ella and Joseph were married.
For a brief time, the Baroness was flattered by her handsome husband, who was at least a presentable escort in society. But she was also alert, and soon she became impatient with his idle and morose comportment. Alas, Joseph Ruston was revealing himself as a common adventurer who had married her for access to her money and the chance to live in the capacious light of her aristocratic family. He made no effort to work for a living, and he seemed to have an excuse when, in November, a Communist revolt caused massive rioting and was put down only with great difficulty. How, he protested, could he go out to work in so unstable a colony? From this time, Joseph Ruston’s conversations were peppered with fervent anti-Communist declamations.
But languor, political tirades and the trivialities of social life were not in Ella’s character, and she had no appreciation of those qualities in others, the general public discord notwithstanding. Within a year of the marriage, there were heated arguments about money, Joseph’s idleness and his alarming emotional indifference to her two sons. In muted desperation, Ella wrote to her parents, who suggested that Joseph might do well to meet some of their business associates in London. This he agreed to do; he very much missed England in any case, and he considered London far more agreeable than Batavia. Hence, in late 1928, Joseph, Ella, Ian and Alexander took the long journey from the East Indies to Britain.
They arrived on Christmas Eve and leased a flat in fashionable Mayfair, a few steps from Hyde Park. The holiday season, Joseph insisted, was no time to hunt for employment, so he waited until February. A colleague of his father-in-law then made Joseph an offer of employment at a British insurance company in Belgium, and in mid-March the Baroness and her husband again packed their luggage, boarded the storm-swept ferry for France and proceeded to Brussels by train.
At the end of May, the newborn baby nearly succumbed to whooping cough. She stopped breathing and began to turn blue, and the nanny froze with panic and called out to Ella. Adding audible prayers to her procedure of turning, spanking and warming the infant, Ella effectively saved her life.
On 18 July, six weeks after their daughter was born, Ella and Joseph Ruston registered the birth with the British vice-consulate in Brussels, for the law considered the child English by descent from her father. According to the document, she was born at 48 rue Keyenveld, also called Keienveldstraat, in the Ixelles district, south-east of the centre of Brussels. The child’s full legal name was Audrey Kathleen Ruston; throughout her life, Audrey carried a British passport.
After World War Two and the death of the last Hepburn relative in Joseph’s maternal ancestry, he legally changed his surname to Hepburn-Ruston, which he thought very posh. The Hepburn clan, which may be traced centuries back in Scottish-Irish history, had dozens of various orthographies, among them Hebburne, Hyburn and Hopbourn. Among his most notable forebears – or so Joseph said – was James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell and third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. But the multiple branches on the Hepburn tree and the doubtful genealogies at several critical junctures render difficult any positive verification of this grand assertion.
The van Heemstra-Ruston house in Brussels was but one of Audrey’s childhood residences. She often spent time with her grandparents at their estates in Arnhem, Holland and, outside Arnhem, at Velp. Ella also took her to visit cousins, most of all when Joseph was absent. He was frequently dispatched to the finance management company’s London office, and when he was at home with the family, he often attended somewhat sinister political meetings in the city centre.
Whenever he returned from a day’s or a week’s business, Joseph was welcomed excitedly by his adoring daughter. But by all accounts, he doted on her no more than he did on Ian and Alex. Ella taught Audrey to read and draw, to enjoy the standard children’s classics and good music, and the child longed to show her father what she was learning. But he showed little interest in her, and Audrey’s response to his coolness was typical of any child: she redoubled her efforts to win his love and approval – alas, to no avail.
Audrey could always rely on her mother’s care, protection and instruction, but (like her husband) Ella was not given to overt displays of affection. A Victorian baroness to her fingertips, she was now more than ever restrained, having lost the spontaneity and gaiety of her youth. She was a serious mother who always had her daughter’s best interests at heart, but the warmth in that heart was cooled by her conviction that dignity forestalled cuddling, and that anything more effusive than a perfunctory good-night kiss was indecorous. Much later, Audrey considered that her mother had been greatly hurt by the failure of her first marriage and the obvious emotional bankruptcy of her second.
Photos taken during childhood show an alert, bright-eyed, smiling and poised girl, and if her mother or half-brothers were in the picture, there was usually an impish grin on Audrey’s face. She always treated household servants as if they were family friends; she loved to be outdoors and to play the usual games and pranks. Ian and Alex recalled that Audrey accompanied them on country walks and hikes, and they enjoyed playing charades. ‘and we were sometimes very naughty,’ according to Ian. ‘Against Mother’s wishes, we did a lot of tree-climbing.’ But when Audrey was five, her half-brothers were fourteen and eleven, and they were dispatched to boarding school; henceforth, their times together were only occasional.
In time, the clever, resourceful and cheerful child became aware of her parents’ increasing arguments and was confused by the cold war that prevailed when they sat down to dinner. The atmosphere became so strained that Audrey often wept in secret, for if she did so in the presence of others, she was scolded. ‘As a child, I was taught that it was bad manners to bring attention to yourself, and to never, ever make a spectacle of yourself . . . I always hear my mother’s voice, saying, “Be on time,” and “Remember to think of others first” and “Don’t talk a lot about yourself. You are not interesting. It’s the others who matter.’” And of course the marital problems were never discussed in front of the child.
One of the issues was certainly Joseph’s right-wing political perspective, which Ella (though she, too, was essentially conservative) found increasingly bizarre.
Belgium was a stable society, but the collapse of the American economy in the autumn of 1929 triggered a worldwide Depression. In Brussels, where the electorate was essentially conservative, the government was granted emergency powers to regulate all trade and commerce at home and abroad – in the Congo, for example, which brought vast revenues from mining. Extremists, Revolutionary Socialists and German-influenced National Socialists were officially barred from holding office, but their numbers increased alarmingly.
By 1934, Fascists could be found in virtually every government agency in Belgium – not in control, but certainly influential. At the time, Audrey had no idea that her father’s political sympathies were so right-wing, that Fascist ideology more and more appealed to him, and that he made frequent forays to political assemblies that were comprised of apprentice Nazis. In fact, both Joseph and Ella had prejudices that embarrassed Audrey Hepburn for the rest of her life.
In the spring of 1935, her parents were collecting funds and recruiting for the British Union of Fascists, under the leadership of the notorious Oswald Mosley. The 26 April issue of the Blackshirt, Mosley’s absurd and fuming weekly, featured a photo of Ella and a ringing endorsement in English so flawless it suggests her husband’s hand:
We who have heard the call of Fascism, and have followed the light on the upward road to victory, have been taught to understand what dimly we knew and now fully realize. At last we are breaking the bondage and are on the road to salvation. We who follow Sir Oswald Mosley know that in him we have found a leader whose eyes are not riveted on earthly things, whose inspiration is of a higher plane, and whose idealism will carry Britain along to the bright light of the new dawn of spiritual rebirth.
The statement’s purple prose says nothing specific. But eleven days later, Ella and Joseph were lunching with Hitler in Munich, accompanied by several of Mosley’s closest allies and three of the Mitford sisters. They returned to Brussels in mid-May, having missed Audrey’s birthday.
Soon there was a deep alienation of Joseph from his wife and daughter. Disconsolate, inarticulate, disinclined to work, dependent on his wife and contemptuous of Jewish, Catholic and ‘coloured’ people, he seemed never to have anything to say to Ella and Audrey, and this naturally affected his daughter’s spirits:’I became a rather moody child, quiet and reticent, and I liked to be by myself a great deal. I seemed to need a great deal of understanding.’ As for her private playtime: ‘I didn’t care for dolls. They never seemed real to me.’ She preferred the companionship of dogs, cats, rabbits and birds, which she drew in chalk and ink with remarkable virtuosity. On the live animals she lavished the sentiments for which she longed and which her parents were unable to provide. ‘I myself was born with an enormous need for affection and a terrible need to give it,’ she said more than once in adulthood. ‘When I was little, I embarrassed my mother by trying to pick babies out of prams on the streets and at markets. The one thing I dreamed of in my life was to have children of my own. It always boils down to the same thing [in my life] – not only receiving love but wanting desperately to give it.’
Small animals and the children of passers-by always received her embraces – such were her attempts ‘to give it’. As for ‘receiving love’, even the semblance of it under the guise of basic domestic security: that was shattered for ever when, at the end of May 1935 – without prior threats or warnings – Joseph Ruston packed his clothes and, apparently without a word to anyone, walked out of the door into rue Keyenveld, never to return.
According to some third-hand sources, Joseph had squandered much of Ella’s living trust and a great deal of the money his father-in-law had settled on him at the time of the marriage. Others claim that he had become an abusive alcoholic. But because the principals remained silent it is impossible to know for certain the catalysing events for the separation. Both Ella and Joseph were stern, aloof, critical characters, although in Ella’s favour it must be said that her sacrifices on Audrey’s behalf, her work to support her daughter’s lessons and interests, betokened a real devotion of which Audrey was always convinced: ‘My mother had great love, but she was not always able to show it . . . Of necessity, my mother became a father, too.’
Neither Joseph nor Ella ever wrote or spoke publicly about their marriage or its finale, and Audrey, who was just six at the time, rarely alluded to it in later life, and then only in a few words: ‘I worshiped my father. Having him cut off from me was terribly awful . . . Leaving us, my father left us insecure – perhaps for life.’ The departure of her father was, she added in 1989, ‘the most traumatic event in my life. I remember my mother’s reaction . . . [her] face, covered with tears . . . [I was] terrified. What was going to happen to me? The ground had gone out from under me.’
According to Audrey’s elder son, this abandonment ‘was a wound that never truly healed’ and he claimed that his mother for the rest of her life ‘never really trusted that love would stay.’ She once alluded to this when she said that she felt ‘very insecure about affection – and terribly grateful for it’. The abandonment of 1935, she added, ‘has stayed with me through my own relationships. When I fell in love and got married, I lived in constant fear of being left.’
That day made Audrey withdraw from the few friends her mother allowed – a withdrawal that must have been partly from shame, partly from a mixture of sorrow and confusion for which she had no words, and partly from the cloud of guilt that darkens the soul of every child when a parent walks out. Did she do something to cause it? Was she in some way unlovable? Her mother assured her that was not the case. Would her father return? Ella doubted that very much. Would she never again have a father? On this matter Ella was silent.
‘Other kids had a father, but I didn’t. I just couldn’t bear the idea that I wouldn’t see him again. And my mother went through sheer agony when my father left. Because he really left. I think he just went out and never came back. I was destroyed at the time. I cried for days and days. But my mother never, ever put him down.’ (According to one of Audrey’s sons, however, Ella ‘spent the war spewing poison about [Ruston], about his disappearance, about his lack of support of any type’.)
There was, though, some consolation. Audrey’s maternal grandparents arrived from Holland, and took the girl and her mother to the family home in Arnhem, about 50 miles south-east of Amsterdam, where the old baron had been mayor from 1920 to 1921.
By the time lawyers drew up the terms of a legal separation Joseph had relocated to London. To the astonishment of Ella’s family, he asked for visiting rights with Audrey – and to everyone’s shock, Ella granted him those rights. This may have had less to do with compassion for his outcast state than with the fact that Ella had decided to place Audrey in a completely new setting – an English boarding school.
At the time, the notion of sending a well-born six-year-old child abroad to school was not considered anything but proper, generous and, for the child, an important maturing experience. In addition, Dutch unemployment was at record levels, and some of those without work were offered low-paying jobs in Germany; if they refused to go, their unemployment benefits ceased. There was also public rioting from 1934 over several measures: when women married, for example, they were dismissed from jobs in public administration so that unemployed men with families could take those positions. And in early 1936, severe economic austerity measures were put in place by Prime Minister Hendrik Colijn. Surely, Ella reasoned, things would be calmer in the English countryside than in Holland, where suddenly there was chaos. Despite her aristocratic bearing and sense of noblesse oblige, Ella was essentially a pragmatist, capable of adapting to life’s circumstances and demands; this trait she passed on to her daughter, who was taught that home was where you made it.
If Joseph would see Audrey at school from time to time and bring her to London for a day’s outing, Ella believed, things could be better for the child – and the Baroness herself would be a frequent visitor. Once again, however, she miscalculated. During the time Audrey attended a small private academy for girls in Kent, she saw her father only four times in as many years. ‘If I could just have seen him regularly, I would have felt he loved me. I would have felt I had a father.’
But something meant more to Ruston than visits with his daughter: he was indeed often in Kent, but he usually dodged the school. (Once, he fetched his daughter and took her for a short trip over south-east England in a small biplane – but such excursions were the exception to his habitual neglect.) The reason for his frequent presence near the school came to light years later. Ruston had for some time been an advocate of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Now, he was meeting with an old friend who had relocated from Brussels – the notorious Englishman Arthur Tester, who channelled Nazi propaganda from Germany to the Mosley headquarters in England. According to the British historian David Turner, Tester’s partner was Joseph Ruston.
In light of Joseph’s and Ella’s earlier involvement with Mosley and Hitler, this development is not surprising – and may in fact have been the major reason for Ruston’s return to Britain. In any case, it must be added that Ella’s connections to the BUF ceased in 1937 and, as Nazism became ever more malevolent and murderous, the Baroness came to regret her contact with Hitler, her affirmation of Mosley and her endorsement of a cause she had completely misapprehended.
Of her school terms in England, from 1936 to 1939, Audrey later said that at first she was ‘terrified, but it turned out to be a good lesson in independence . . . I liked the children and the teachers, but I never liked the process of learning in a classroom. I was very restless and could never sit for hours on end. I liked history and mythology and astronomy – but I hated anything to do with arithmetic. School itself I found very dull, and I was happy when I was finished.’
But there was one session each week that Audrey very much loved and anticipated: the hours when a London ballet master led the girls in dance classes. Ella visited the school on Audrey’s tenth birthday – 4 May 1939. She arrived just in time for a dance recital that featured her daughter. The teacher and her classmates were enthusiastic in their applause, and Audrey was glowing.
ELLA AND AUDREY spent the summer of 1939 with a family friend near the seaside town of Folkestone, where they toured the colourful gardens, admired the Georgian stone houses, lunched on the harbour promenade, strolled along sandy beaches, swam in a protected inlet of the Channel and enjoyed the outdoor band concerts.
Their summer idyll ended suddenly and anxiously during the first four days of September, when Nazi troops invaded Poland; Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand declared war on Germany; and the British Royal Air Force attacked Hitler’s navy. With England now at war, Ella – convinced that Germany would never attack neutral Holland – at once took her daughter and headed for her father’s estate in peaceful Arnhem. The old Baron was delighted to welcome them, not least because a terrible depression had overcome him on the death of his wife five months earlier. Before the end of September, Ella and Audrey were comfortably and securely settled in the sprawling white family mansion. That same month, Ella received the final legal documents confirming the dissolution of her marriage to Joseph Ruston.
At the same time, Joseph was among hundreds of English Fascists who were – without indictment or trial – summarily shipped off to house arrest on the Isle of Man. There was not a shred of evidence that Ruston ever acted in support of the Nazi regime during wartime. And if every Englishman who lunched with Hitler and was photographed smiling and shaking his hand could be reasonably accused of high treason, the Duke of Windsor himself – once the (uncrowned) King of England – would also have been a candidate for arrest and internment. According to one of Joseph’s grandsons, ‘In no way did [Ruston], or my grandmother [Ella] for that matter, ever support either the war or the Holocaust. They may have supported certain Fascist ideologies and belonged to the appropriate parties, but they never hurt anyone or knowingly supported any system that did.’
Arnhem seemed far from the dangers of war. With large parks, appealing fountains and waterfalls, undulating forest paths and venues for theatre, music and dance, the town was a genteel sanctuary for wealthy city residents and for tourists.
The van Heemstras celebrated a traditional Christmastide. There were parties, visits from Ian and Alex, and from relatives far and near. Audrey welcomed her uncle (her mother’s only brother), a much respected and well-liked judge who hated all forms of intolerance and was dedicated to peace; and there was also a cousin to whom she was close in her childhood. Holiday gatherings and reunions with loving relatives always took the sting out of her fatherless situation.
That autumn and winter, many people saw not much cause for concern, despite the situations in Czechoslovakia and Poland, which had already come completely under Nazi hegemony. War had been declared, but it was called a phoney war. Thus, at the beginning of 1940, very few Dutch people feared for their future – until the Nazis invaded Denmark and Norway on 9 April. But even then, a kind of narcotised calm prevailed. The Sadler’s Wells Ballet, the great English troupe, was performing in Arnhem on 9 May, and Ella took Audrey as a birthday celebration.
‘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, obviously . . . It went all the way to the ground, and it rustled. The reason she got me this, at great expense, 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?.’ She did just that, offering the spray of tulips and roses that were hurriedly accepted, for the dancers had been ordered by the British vice-consul to leave Arnhem that very night.
The next day, Friday 10 May, German armies invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg without warning; three days later, Rotterdam fell to the Germans after the city had been blasted by an air attack that killed almost 30,000 Dutch civilians: the Germans had issued a surrender ultimatum but then launched their attack before the Dutch could reply. On the same day, Queen Wilhelmina, her family and her government fled Holland for London, whence they directed the war effort of the Dutch navy, the colonies and the growing resistance. Then incendiary bombs were dropped on The Hague. But Dutch soldiers, heirs to a century-long legacy of peace in their country, were trained and equipped for defence rather than attack, and as the minimal supplies and all the aircraft were swiftly lost, the Dutch army capitulated and Holland surrendered.
Nazi troops and artillery then tore through Arnhem, exploiting local facilities and despoiling where they could to support the German war machine. ‘I saw German trucks coming in, and in five days Holland fell,’ Audrey remembered. ‘The occupation – that’s such a small word to cover the eternity of every day after the Germans came to our country, looted it, and stayed on to make slaves of us.’ For the present, Audrey’s family was permitted to remain in the ancestral home; word had come down from Nazi headquarters that an occupation achieved with citizens’ cooperation would facilitate a total German conquest of the Low Countries.
Over the next ten months the van Heemstra bank accounts, securities and personal jewellery were confiscated. Secure in their wealth for centuries, they now saw almost everything taken away.
The German occupiers were eager to rouse anti-English sentiment a prejudice that took such extreme forms as banning the import of biscuits and preserves from Britain. For Ella and her family, this raised a major concern: Audrey Ruston was a British citizen with a British name and was fluent in English – a combination that might easily subject her to arrest and even deportation. Her daughter would have to learn the Dutch language and pass for Dutch. With remarkable shrewdness, Ella enrolled her daughter in the local school as Edda van Heemstra, not as Audrey Kathleen Ruston. The newly minted identity was successful for so long as the girl needed it (that is, for the duration of the war), then it was promptly discarded.
‘My real name was never Edda van Heemstra. That was a name I assumed in school, because my mother thought it wiser during the German occupation, as mine sounded too English.’ Ella also cautioned Audrey not to speak English in public, as German soldiers were everywhere.
‘For eight formative years [1939 to 1947], I spoke Dutch. My mother is Dutch, my father English, but I was born in Belgium. So I had heard English and Dutch inside our house and French outside.’ Following that, she had spoken only English at school in Kent, and then only Dutch in Holland. ‘There is no speech I can relax into when I’m tired, because my ear has never been accustomed to one intonation. It’s because I have no mother tongue that the critics accuse me of curious speech.’
It was precisely these polyglot early years that accounted for her unique vocal patterns – the elegantly clipped tones, the almost musical undulation of her phrasing and the prolongation of internal vowels that characterised the mature Audrey Hepburn’s spoken English. Her speech was wholly sui generis, and it always defied comparison with any known dialect. No other voice could be mistaken for hers.
Daily life in Nazi-occupied Holland, from 1940 to 1945, began badly and became a living nightmare. First of all, there was an almost constant state of anxiety as aircraft flew low overhead. Was that a British aeroplane on a reconnaissance mission, or was it a German attack? Like their parents, children took cover in cellars, closets and cupboards – and when they emerged unharmed, they were scarcely reassured, for the Nazis broadcast threats daily.
Strict rationing was soon applied. Because the Germans needed oil, gasoline, tyres, coffee, tea and all textiles for their military, the population had limited access to them. Barges were requisitioned; bicycles, shoes and even iron destined for church bells were commandeered. Under Nazi control, Dutch radio constantly advised people on how to economise – by reusing tea leaves several times, for example, and by encouraging families to crowd into one room, the better to save fuel.
And so a country that had enjoyed an enviably high standard of living was soon sinking into poverty and disease; as the war dragged on, very few people were able to cling to property of any value, and tuberculosis struck the citizens in epidemic numbers by 1943. During wartime winters, some citizens – who would never have considered such actions before the war – chopped down trees in public parks for use as firewood and plundered abandoned homes for whatever was marketable.
Before long, the rights of Dutch Jews were limited, Jewish teachers and professors were dismissed from their posts, and Jewish students could no longer attend schools. Doctors were forbidden to treat Jewish patients, who were also turned away from hospitals. Jewish women married to gentiles had to endure forced sterilisation. The deportation of Dutch Jews occurred in 1942, a development that led to public denunciations from the Roman Catholic and Dutch Reformed Churches. The first punishment for such insubordination was to deport Jews who had converted to Christianity, such as the brilliant Jewish philosopher Edith Stein, who had become a Catholic and a Carmelite nun; she was executed at Auschwitz.
‘Families with babies, little children being hauled into meat wagons, wooden vans with just a slat at the top, and all those faces staring out at you,’ Audrey recalled later, listing snapshot memories of those deported from Holland to concentration camps. ‘I knew the cold clutch of human terror all through my early teens: I saw it, felt it, heard it – and it never goes away. You see, it wasn’t just a nightmare: I was there, and it all happened.’
In 1941, Ella’s older son Alex vanished. Fighting for the hapless Dutch army at the beginning of the war, he was captured when the forces surrendered. Somehow he escaped and went into hiding until the end of the war. But at the time Ella and Audrey had no idea what had become of him, and in their worst moments, they assumed Alex was dead. For days, Audrey wept inconsolably, asking again and again if all of them were to be sent to prison or condemned to death. ‘I didn’t know if I would just disappear as had so many young girls and women, into the houses established for the “entertainment” of German officers and enlisted men. And I didn’t know if I would be taken for a week or a day, to help clean a building or serve at a military kitchen. All I knew was that I was twelve, and terrified.’
But as E. N. van Kleffens, then the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, wrote in 1940, ‘The Dutch have a gift of shrewd perspicacity which no propaganda can obliterate, [and] outward resignation should not be taken for inward submission’ to the Nazis. Precisely this spirit was evident in the remarkable story of the spirited and heroic members of the Dutch resistance to the German invasion. The resistance was first concerned with maintaining calm until the end of the war. Later, when it was clear that the restoration of peace was not a proximate reality, the Council of Resistance in the Kingdom of the Netherlands was founded, and its members were armed.
A robust eighteen-year-old in 1942, Ella’s younger son Ian was an early and intrepid member of the resistance during his student days in Utrecht. He began his anti-German efforts by distributing pamphlets that encouraged his countrymen and were therefore subversive to the demoralising tactics of the occupiers. He then worked in secret with the so-called Radio Orange network, which from time to time broadcast a quarter-hour speech by Queen Wilhelmina from London; she promoted the Dutch people’s identification with the Allies.
Ian was also remarkable for organising student strikes in Delft and Leiden when Jewish professors were dismissed – and he helped obtain false identification papers and food coupons for some Jews who would otherwise have been loaded into boxcars heading for German concentration camps. Despite death threats from the Nazis, resistance workers urged labour strikes among Dutch railway personnel, so that the arrival of German materiel was interrupted whenever possible. And when the battle lines came to Holland, the resistance evoked heroic exploits from ordinary Dutch citizens, who assisted Allied soldiers during parachute landings, providing both first aid and hideaways for the wounded.
Unfortunately, Ian’s increasingly bold activities were discovered by the Germans. He was stopped one day in Arnhem and immediately deported to Germany, where he was one of 400,000 Dutchmen put to forced labour in munitions factories until the war was over. His whereabouts, too, were unknown to the family until his return in 1945.
Around the same time (June 1942), Audrey and her family experienced at first hand the savagery of the Nazi regime. The Dutch underground had attempted to demolish a German train bringing military supplies into Holland, and reprisals were enacted at once in Arnhem. Audrey’s beloved uncle, the judge; her cousin, an adjutant at court; another cousin and four neighbours were all rounded up. The scene was for ever burned into the memory of thirteen-year-old Audrey: ‘Don’t discount anything you hear or read about the Nazis. It was worse than you could ever imagine. We saw my relatives put against the wall and shot.’ With that, and to her everlasting credit, Baroness Ella van Heemstra began to work actively with the Dutch resistance, even to the point of hiding underground workers in their home.
In 1941, her mother supplemented Audrey’s Dutch lessons with enrolment in afternoon music and dance classes at the Arnhem Conservatory, which waived most fees during the occupation and asked only what levende tafelerentableaux vivants