CHAPTER 1

Holland and the Bridge Too Far (1929-1947)

“I had an enormous complex about my looks. I thought I was ugly and I was afraid nobody would ever marry me.”

—AUDREY HEPBURN

ON THE DAY OF THE GREATEST AIRBORNE INVASION IN HISTORY, Audrey Hepburn was a skinny girl of fifteen—stunned and exhilarated by the prospect of imminent liberation from the Nazis and incredulous that it was taking place in her own provincial Dutch town of Arnhem. Now, on September 17, 1944, Arnhem found itself the scene of the single most daring Allied gambit of World War II. That day—combined with 1,800 other days under the Nazi occupation—would have repercussions on her life forever.

Strange circumstances had brought her there, and even stranger circumstances would turn the teen who stood watching that invasion into the most beautiful icon of her era. “Audrey Hepburn looks like every girl and like no girl,” said a friend. “She doesn’t even look like Audrey Hepburn.”¹ She was a ballet dancer, who never performed a full ballet. She was the world’s highest paid film actress, who never studied acting.

The pessimists said no new feminine ideal could emerge from the war, wrote Cecil Beaton, but the rubble of Holland, an English accent, and an American success would produce a wistful child who embodied the spirit of a new day. “Nobody ever looked like her before,” said Beaton, except maybe “those wild children of the French Revolution.” She had enormous eyes and thick eyebrows, an incredibly long and slender neck, and was “too tall” by the standard of the day. And yet, like a Modigliani portrait, “the distortions are not only interesting in themselves but make a completely satisfying composite.”²

She would come to represent not just a new look but a new femininity—the diametric European opposite of the American sex goddess. Diva Maria Callas, and a few million others, would use her as a model.³ “She comes at an historical moment,” wrote critic Molly Haskell, “just before feminism, easy divorce and the sexual revolution.” She was the vulnerable waif, discreet and ambiguous to the end. That persona in Love in the Afternoon, said Stanley Kauffmann, was typical: “The sign of her preparing to take the plunge was when she removes a glove.”

Child-women have fascinated film audiences since Lillian Gish, but Hepburn’s version came with a paradoxical glamour and sophistication. Most glamour queens began as waitresses or shop girls and had to be groomed for the throne by their studios. Not Audrey Hepburn. She arrived more or less in complete form, like Botticelli’s Venus on the half-shell. Beauty and glamour may coincide but are by no means the same thing. Beauty is visual—necessary but not sufficient for glamour, which is more abstract. And if glamour is a form of mass hypnosis, Hepburn was the finest film hypnotist of her time.⁴

Of the great movie goddesses, only Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor decorated more covers of Life than Audrey Hepburn, and only Garbo held more aloof from Hollywood. Over forty years, she starred in just twenty films but imbued them all with a remarkable, original presence. When she sings “Moon River,” softly confiding her melancholy to her guitar, “she is not an actress we judge but a person we know and love,” wrote one admirer. “That face would have excused a lot of awkward performances and bad movies. Happily, it didn’t have to.”⁵

What shined through, too, was her regal aura. “She is one of us,” Queen Mother Elizabeth reportedly told her daughter after they met Hepburn. It seemed to Haskell “as if she dropped out of the sky into the fifties, half wood-nymph, half princess, and then disappeared ... leaving no footprints ... a changeling of mysterious parentage, unidentifiable as to nationality or class.”

Perhaps, then, it is no surprise to learn that she was the daughter of a real-life baroness.

AUDREY HEPBURN’S MOTHER belonged to an ancient family of the Dutch nobility. Her grandfather, Baron Aernoud van Heemstra (1871-1957), was a lawyer and familiar figure at the court of Queen Wilhelmina. His ancestors had held high positions in the Netherlands as statesmen and soldiers from the twelfth century. Audrey’s life had its share of problems, but she would never suffer from an identity crisis: Portraits of her ancestors hung in museums and aristocratic homes throughout Holland.

The van Heemstras’ original wealth derived from colonial trading, but Baron Aernoud preferred government service to commerce. In 1896, he married Elbrig van Asbeck, who bore him five daughters and a son. Ella, the third child and future mother of Audrey, was born in 1900 in the province of Gelderland.

Ella wanted to study for the opera, but the stage was out of bounds. “Whatever you do, don’t associate with actors and actresses,” the Baron decreed. “You’d bring disgrace on the family.” Ella’s friend Alfred (“Freddie”) Heineken III, of the Dutch brewery family, calls her “a born actress, very dramatic, highly emotional, with a great sense of fun. But in those times, a daughter of the nobility was forbidden to have a career. She was expected to marry well and have lots of children.”

Ella would lament that she “grew up wanting more than anything else to be English, slim, and an actress.” The dutiful daughter forsook those yearnings but vowed that if she ever had a talented daughter, she would encourage her. Her own comfortable childhood was spent at several family estates—notably Doorn Castle near Utrecht (now the Huis-Doorn Museum), a gorgeous manse surrounded by beautifully landscaped grounds and a swan-filled moat. But Ella’s generation of van Heemstras did not occupy it for long.

Dwarfed by the powerful memory of World War Il is World War I: Few recall that Holland was neutral in that conflict, at the end of which Kaiser Wilhelm II fled Germany for the Netherlands. The victorious Allies declared him a war criminal, but the ever-clement Dutch declined to hand him over. The van Heemstras were obliged not only to accommodate him at Doorn but, in 1920, to sell it to him. There he fantasized about his restoration and, in noxious Prussian fashion, cut down a tree a day “for exercise.” Joseph J. O’Donohue IV—a future in-law of the future actress Audrey Hepburn—recalls visiting Doorn in the early 1930s at the invitation of the Kaiser’s grandson, Prince Louis Ferdinand:

One was received by Baron von Grancy, the Hofmarshall, and escorted across the moat to the castle. There, one was introduced to the other guests in a large room notable for [its German] furnishings. [After sherry] a lackey opened a large door [and] a plump Dachshund waddled regally into the room, followed by the Kaiser whose gait was considerably livelier. [After presentations], we proceeded into the handsome dining room where I was seated on the Emperor’s right. [Following lunch], we retired to the Smoking Room, largely dedicated to paintings and memorabilia of Frederick the Great, for whom the Kaiser had a hero-worship almost as great as his love for his grandmother, Queen Victoria.⁶

The last of the kaisers lived at Huis-Doorn until his death in 1941 (when Hitler granted him a military funeral). The van Heemstras, long before that, had taken up residence at another of their estates just outside the western Dutch town of Arnhem: Zijpendaal, a pristine mini-castle, dating to 1743, was nestled in a picturesque rustic setting with stables and a water mill and out-buildings for the keepers of its well-manicured park and horses.^a The Baron and his brood lived there in aristocratic fashion from 1910 through 1920, during which he served as the burgomaster—or mayor—of Arnhem.

He would soon be called to a more exotic locale but first attended to the matrimonial disposition of his nineteen-year-old Ella. She was married in Arnhem on March 11, 1920, to Hendrik Gustaaf Adolf Quarles van Ufford, Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau. A former lieutenant in the Queen’s equerry, he was now an oil executive of Bataafsche Petroleum (later Dutch Shell), newly assigned to the Netherlands East Indies. He took his bride to Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital) where, precisely nine months after the wedding, their son Alexander was born.

The Dutch empire was far-flung, and Ella’s father now headed for its most remote outpost: In 1921, he was appointed Governor of Surinam (Dutch Guiana) on the northeast coast of South America. It was a territory roughly the size of Georgia, running from the Caribbean seaboard to Brazil, received in a 1667 trade with Britain in exchange for New Amsterdam—the present state and city of New York. It seemed like a good deal at the time.

Nearly half the colony’s population of 300,000 lived in Paramaribo, the capital. In the colorful Asian market area near the waterfront were several Hindu temples and the Caribbean’s largest mosque, peacefully located next to a synagogue. All in all, Paramaribo was an ecumenical city, unmistakably Dutch in character despite its bizarre population mix.^b The relative lack of racial tensions was due largely to the tradition of Dutch tolerance: Surinamese knew how to get along with one another.

Paramaribo boasted many beautiful eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial buildings in the Dutch neo-Norman style. Not least of them was the Governor’s Mansion, situated on a plaza with the impossible Dutch name of Onafhankelijkheidsplein. As Baroness Elbrig was often ill, her seventeen-year-old daughter Jacqueline took her place as hostess, serving in that role for the length of her father’s administration. In the future, she would become lady-in-waiting to Princess (later Queen) Juliana; for now, Surinam would provide her with a perfect—and perfectly beautiful—training ground. The official residence, surrounded by orchids that grew twelve feet tall, greatly impressed the van Heemstras from the moment they laid eyes on it.

The Surinamese, in turn, were impressed with Baron van Heemstra. He was the first governor to travel deep into the interior, where white Europeans seldom penetrated. His purpose was business, not pleasure: He was scouting new ways to exploit the country’s extraordinary natural resources, including its huge deposits of bauxite. Soon, Surinam’s bauxite/aluminum industry would account for 72 percent of its exports.

The atmosphere of Paramaribo was charmed. Among its customs were birdsong competitions in the public parks. People routinely carried their pet songbirds in cages when out for a stroll, and even to work. Life was good, and so was the cuisine—as exotic as Surinam’s ethnic makeup—featuring pom, a puree of cassava, and peanut soup with plantain dumplings. The climate was moist but not terribly hot, thanks to the northeast trade winds year round. It was truly, in many ways, a tropical paradise.

But there was trouble in another paradise, halfway around the globe in Batavia, where Ella’s marriage was not going well. The constant quarrels between her and Quarles van Ufford ended in 1925, a year after their second son Ian was born, when they were divorced in the Netherlands East Indies. Divorce was quite rare for an aristocratic Dutchwoman of that time, said a friend, “but she preferred that to taking a lover, like most.”⁷ Ella was a strong-willed, energetic woman who loved the good life and had a fatal weakness for good-looking men. She took herself and the boys to join her family in the colonial splendor of Paramaribo—but not for long. For Ella, unlike sister Jacqueline, the novelty of Surinam wore off in less than a year, and after returning briefly to Arnhem, she went back to Indonesia.

Her real agenda was to renew and pursue her relationship with an Anglo-Irish businessman, Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, whom she had met there earlier. He, too, had recently been divorced—in San Francisco, of all places. In Ella’s set, marriages and divorces were more easily conducted in exotic locales: On September 7, 1926, she and Joe were wed in Batavia.

Ruston was born in 1889 in Slovakia, where his British father had business.

His claims to have studied at Cambridge and served in the British Army during World War I are unverified, but after the war he did join the diplomatic service and was assigned to the Dutch East Indies as vice-consul at Semarang, a town between Batavia and Surabaja. He later gave that up for a job with the Batavia arbitrage house of Maclaine Watson & Company, which handled trading in East Indian tin.

The allure of Java did not include its oppressive heat or its limited social excitement, and the couple soon opted for Europe again. But Ruston’s transfer to Maclaine Watson’s London headquarters lasted only for a year. Always restless, he next joined an Anglo-French credit society dealing in home loans and the like. That company armed him with the title of vice president and deputy administrator and sent him to open a new branch office in Belgium, where he, Ella and the two boys settled down in the Ixelles district of Brussels.

Half a century later, most chroniclers would characterize Audrey Hepburn’s father as a “banker” who was employed in the Bank of England’s Brussels branch and who, after marrying Ella, handled the van Heemstra family’s properties and finances. Late in life, Audrey bluntly denied it: “They speak of my father having been a banker, which he wasn’t at all. He never really held down a job.”⁸

The Bank of England was an exchequer or treasury, not a conventional bank, and in fact had no foreign branch in Brussels or anywhere else. Ruston’s initial interest in Ella was enhanced by his incorrect assumption that her family had vast wealth, but he was sadly if not bitterly disabused of that notion early on.

The term “international banker” described him less well than “international adventurer.” The term “pregnant” now described his wife.

AUDREY KATHLEEN VAN HEEMSTRA RUSTON was born in Brussels on May 4, 1929. “Audrey” was a feminine form of “Andrew,” which was to have been her name if she’d been a boy. Her birth certificate omits the hyphenated “Hepburn” before Ruston; Ella allegedly added it later to spiff up her own and her daughter’s future calling card. According to biographer Warren Harris, it was the only aristocratic name Ella could find in Ruston’s family tree—the surname of his grandmother, who was descended from James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. Since the baby’s father and Dutch mother were both British citizens in the eyes of the law, the new baby was likewise certified by the British consulate in Brussels.

“If I were to write a book about myself,” Audrey once told her son Sean, “it would start like this: I was born on May 4, 1929, and I died three weeks later.” At twenty-one days of age, she contracted such a terrible case of whooping cough that her heart stopped. Ella, who was a rather strict Christian Scientist and had not called a doctor, revived her by spanking. “There was no giving up on this baby,” said Sean. “I think that had an effect on her whole life, [as if she’d been given] a second chance.”⁹

Her early years were chaotic, with constant traveling back and forth between London and Brussels, Arnhem and The Hague. Alexander and Ian stayed often in those days with Ella’s parents and saw little of stepfather Hepburn-Ruston. Ella was as restless as her husband and, when Audrey was a toddler of two, insisted on moving the family from Brussels to a small estate called Castel Sainte-Cecile in the nearby village of Linkebeek.

Baron van Heemstra had by then resigned as Governor of Surinam and returned to live with his daughter Mies and her husband, Count Otto van Limburg Stirum, at Zijpendaal Castle, where Audrey often visited and roamed the gorgeous grounds. But, by and large, she did not recall her early childhood fondly. She was a puny, introverted little girl who had trouble making friends and preferred the tomboyish companionship of her much older half-brothers. She cared much less for dolls, which “never seemed real to me,” she said, than for animals.

Her happiest moments by far were in the country. “I had a passion for the outdoors, for trees, for birds and flowers,” she said—and for Rudyard Kipling, inspired by brother Alexander, “the original bookworm.... When we were children he was devoted to Kipling [and] I read all Kipling’s books because I wanted to be like him. I followed everything else he read, too. Before I was thirteen I had read nearly every book by Edgar Wallace and Edward Phillips Oppenheim, who wrote a long series of romantic mysteries about secret international documents, shifty diplomats and seductive adventuresses.... To me as a girl they had far more appeal than books like Topsy Goes to School. ”¹⁰

Reading became a lifeline for her. She spoke of The Secret Garden as one of her favorite books and of the fact that, at the age of nine, her mother gave her a copy of Heidi just before they embarked on a train trip from Holland to Italy. She started it instantly and, by the time she finished, they were in Italy without her having seen a glimpse of Switzerland.¹¹

Ian was also a voracious reader, and also close to his little sister. “We were very naughty,” he said. “We did a lot of tree climbing.” Ella would reprimand sharply and “threaten to disown me,” Audrey recalled:

My mother was not a very affectionate person. She was a fabulous mother, but she had a Victorian upbringing of great discipline, of great ethics. She was very strict, very demanding of her children. She had a lot of love within her, but she was not always able to show it. I went searching all over the place to find somebody who would cuddle me, and I found it, in my aunts and nannies.¹²

Several of her aunts encouraged Audrey to begin piano lessons, which she did. But there would be no escaping her mother’s overbearing presence. Robert Wolders, the soft-spoken Dutchman with whom Audrey spent the last dozen years of her life, knew Ella well as “a superior woman, very humorous, extremely well read and well educated—but critical of everyone, including Audrey. Biased, intolerant.”¹³

Audrey’s childhood was fairly cloistered and indeed full of nannies and private tutors. Though never wanting for a thing, she was keenly aware of the tension between her parents, who fought incessantly over money and other matters. She became increasingly withdrawn and hypersensitive, often seeking refuge in the fields of her family’s estates. Hiding and eating became preoccupations: “It was either chocolates, bread or my nails.”

Her father’s work took him abroad a great deal, and only when he was away did the child seem to find moments of peace. But when he returned, the bickering resumed, and so did Audrey’s introversion. To draw her out, her mother decided to try the “shock” treatment: She sent Audrey, at age five, to a boarding school in England.

At first, “I was terrified about being away from home,” said Hepburn in adulthood. She was teased for being shy and plump, unlike her hockey-playing peers, and for her imperfect English. She missed her mother terribly. Her father, nearby in London, made little effort to see her. Even so, she concluded stoically, “it turned out to be a good lesson in independence.”¹⁴

The school was run by the six unmarried Rigden sisters in Elham, Kent. To immerse the girl further in English customs and language, Ella arranged for her to spend holidays with a coal miner’s family in the country, where she learned the names of all the flowers—and never forgot them.¹⁵

“Those people had a remarkable effect on her,” says Wolders. “She always kept a picture of their terrier on her dressing-room table.” Many years later, she went back to look them up and helped their son adopt a child through the UN.

AUDREY WAS adjusting well to England, but English politics and the gathering storm over Europe were now compounding the maladjustment of her parents. In mid-1930s Britain, the growth and appeal of fascism were by no means universally condemned. Sir Oswald Mosley, once a top minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government, had formed the British Union of Fascists (BUF). His companion and future wife was Diana Mitford, whose sister Unity was also sympathetic to the movement. Ella was friendly with the Mitfords and evidently encouraged her rabidly anti-Communist husband to join up.

As the BUF grew in strength, the Hepburn-Rustons were openly involved in its fund-raising and recruitment. Ella was so devoted to Mosley that she publicly endorsed him in the April 26, 1935, edition of BUF’s weekly paper, The Blackshirt, a glamorous photo of herself accompanying her article:

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.

A few weeks later, in May, Ella and her husband joined Mosley’s BUF delegation to Germany to observe conditions under the Nazis. They toured autobahns, factories, schools and housing developments, and had the heady honor of meeting Hitler himself at the Nazis’ Brown House headquarters in Munich. A group photo taken there—showing the Hepburn-Rustons with Unity Mitford, her sisters Pamela and Mary, and others—was long enshrined in a silver frame on Ella’s mantelpiece.

The extent to which Ella’s fascist involvement was sincere or merely in misguided support of her husband’s ambitions is still unknown. Her article and the Brown House photo are the only clear pieces of evidence, and she never elaborated to her daughter in later years. In any case, the thrill of meeting the Führer had no magical effect on their domestic situation. Almost immediately after their return from Germany, in that same month of May 1935, Ruston walked out on his wife and six-year-old girl.

Dutch sources claim Joseph Hepburn-Ruston was a heavy drinker and that he and Ella argued about it.¹⁶ But more compelling reasons for departure were contained in his increasing radicalism: He soon quit the BUF to join an even more violently anti-Semitic splinter group. Ella’s father was said to be incensed not only by his son-in-law’s politics but by the belief that Ruston was mismanaging the van Heemstras’ money and—worse—channeling some of it to fascist causes. By one account, Queen Wilhelmina herself urged the old Baron to silence Ella and pay off Ruston, if necessary to get him out of the family.¹⁷

Audrey called her father’s disappearance “the most traumatic event in my life” and “a tragedy from which I don’t think I’ve ever recovered. I worshiped him and missed him terribly from the day he disappeared.... If I could have just seen him regularly, I would have felt he loved me, and I would have felt I had a father. But as it was, I always envied other people’s fathers, came home with tears, because they had a daddy.”¹⁸ Equally painful was her mother’s reaction and the haunting memory of it:

You look into your mother’s face, and it’s covered with tears, and you’re terrified. You say to yourself, “What’s going to happen to me?” The ground has gone out from under you....¹⁹ He really left. He just went out and never came back. Watching her agony was one of the worst experiences of my life. She cried for days until I thought she’d never stop, even when we went shopping. I was left with a sense of helplessness, of... not ever really understanding why Daddy had gone away.²⁰

There was a frightening physical manifestation of the disaster, too. When her father left, she said, “my mother’s hair turned white overnight. [But she] never ever put him down.” Instead, “of necessity, my mother became a father too.”²¹ Ella began to spend more time in England with Audrey, who, despite her parents’ breakup, made the school’s honor roll and was making friends more easily. Most important, one of the many Miss Rigdens—a disciple of Isadora Duncan—was now helping her discover the art form that would captivate her for life.

“I fell in love with dancing,” she recalled. “In this village in Kent where I stayed, there was a young dancer who would come up from London once a week and give ballet classes. I loved it, just loved it.”²²

Her life now settled down into a rather pleasant routine, largely undisturbed until the formal divorce of her parents in 1938. Ella got primary custody of nine-year-old Audrey. Hepburn-Ruston insisted that she remain in England and that he be given visitation rights. Ella resisted the second demand but gave in when Audrey pleaded for it. It turned out to be a moot point, in view of his subsequent failure to exercise those rights.

A year later came another upheaval for Audrey in the monumental upheaval of the world. Her mother came to collect her one day from school and was chatting with the dance instructor, who wanted to develop the girl’s talent. Audrey overheard their conversation: “The teacher said, ‘Would you let me take her to London?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m taking her back to Holland.’”²³

Ella and her sons had been visiting relatives in Arnhem when England declared war on Germany, following the Nazi invasion of Poland, in September 1939. Travel could be curtailed at any moment; she might be separated from her daughter for years. Ella returned in panic to Britain and hastily obtained court approval (over Hepburn-Ruston’s objections) to remove Audrey to Holland.

“She thought London was about to be bombed and that she and Audrey would be safer in Arnhem,” recalls Freddie Heineken.²⁴ The notion seems foolish in hindsight but was not at the time: Holland was neutral and certain to remain so. Ella and most of her countrymen clung to the naive belief that Hitler would respect the neutrality of his “Dutch cousins.” Very few commercial planes were still permitted to fly, but Ella pulled strings to get Audrey on one of them.

“Somehow she had contacted my father and asked him to meet me at the train in London where I was coming in [from Kent],” she told writer Dominick Dunne half a century later. “They put me on this bright-orange plane [the Dutch national color], and it flew very low. It really was one of the last planes out. That was the last time I saw my father.”²⁵

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 declared, “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 course, 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.”

Wartime reviews of her dance-school performances were, in fact, invariably enthusiastic about Audrey—the embryonic positive publicity of a lifetime. Wrote one critic, in July 1941, of a Marova school performance in the Musis Sacrum theater: “As all of them are just at the start of their dance development, we do not want to mention any names except for Audrey Hepburn who, in spite of the age of only twelve, was noticed because of her very individual personality and performance. She danced the ‘Serenade’ of Moszkowski with her own choreography.”⁴⁵

A year later, she was singled out again by the Courant: Audrey Hepburn “is only thirteen years old and has a natural talent that is in good hands with Winja a Marova.” And again, in 1943: “She has a beautiful figure, posture [and] gave the most beautiful performance of the evening.”

Such public praise helped brighten her days and her life inside the house on Sickeslaan. It was modest for a baroness, but then the Dutch have always had a wide range of poor nobility. “My mother didn’t have a dime,” Audrey often protested later. “I don’t know why people always think that just because my mother had a title, she was also wealthy.”⁴⁶

From Sickeslaan, they moved up to a brand-new rental house at 8A Jansbinnensingel, in a sector whose fountains and sculptures are still the jewels of Arnhem. The house was tastefully decorated by Ella to serve both as a domicile and as a showcase for her freelance design business. Audrey and Ella would remain there through the rest of the war, having no contact with neighbors and keeping entirely to themselves. They were so short of funds that Ella also gave bridge lessons to bring in a little extra cash, and felt no shame in doing so.⁴⁷

Virtually all of the van Heemstra family’s property had by then been confiscated : property, homes, bank accounts, securities and even jewelry. Old Baron Aernoud was barely able to secure permission to stay in his own home, Zijpendaal. Ella’s sister and brother-in-law, Miesje and Otto, who were living with him, had to leave to make room for some Nazi officers. Eventually, the Baron himself was evicted, with permission to join Miesje and Otto in another of his houses in Oosterbeek.⁴⁸

Due to her British citizenship, Audrey was in some danger of internment, if and when it suited German needs, and Ella warned her ever more fiercely never to speak English in public. The reverse of that dilemma was taking place in England, where Joseph Ruston was among hundreds of pro-Nazi activists—including Oswald Mosley—imprisoned without trial by the government under the infamous Regulation 18b (much as the Americans were interning Japanese), despite a row in Parliament over its legality. Most of them, including Audrey’s father, spent two to three years in London jails before being moved to a detention camp on the Isle of Man. His treatment was severe in both places.

The wife and daughter he had abandoned knew nothing of it.

THE SUFFERING of English fascists, at its worst, was nothing compared to the Nazi crimes against the Jews. Nowhere were the atrocities worse than in Holland where, during the previous forty years of Queen Wilhelmina’s long liberal reign, all barriers between Christians and Jews had been erased. In 1933, when Hitler began his persecutions in earnest, thousands of German Jews fled—and were welcomed—to the Netherlands.

The first major blow to Dutch Jewry came in October 1940, when Jewish enterprises were forced to register, for eventual confiscation. A month later, all Jewish teachers, doctors and civil servants were dismissed. In December, Jews were barred from theaters and, soon, from parks and hotels. When the first physical attacks on Jews began the following February, Gentiles declared a strike in Amsterdam, paralyzing public services. As a result of that act of rebellion, municipal councils were dissolved and their powers transferred to Nazi commissioners.

In June 1941, more than seven hundred young Jewish men were rounded up at random and sent to Buchenwald. Their parents were later informed that the ashes of their sons could be obtained in exchange for “adequate payment.” Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, declared: “We do not consider the Jews a part of the Dutch people. They are the enemy with whom we neither wish to come to a truce, nor to a peace.”

By 1942, Jewish-owned industries and real estate had been “Aryanized.” Most Jews were transported to the larger cities and herded into ghettos. Their household goods were sent to Germany as “gifts to the victims of RAF bombings.” Dutch Jews were now obliged to wear a yellow Star of David with the inscription “Jood” in mock-Hebrew letters. The number of Jewish suicides grew; some also took the lives of their children. About 30,000 went into hiding, assisted by Gentiles with forged ration books.

Both the Catholic and Protestant clergy opposed the madness from the start. Priests were forbidden to say Mass for dead Nazi soldiers. The Dutch Reformed Church urged disobedience to all anti-Semitic Nazi decrees, declaring: “The Jews have lived among us for centuries and are bound up with us in a common history.” Infuriated by such opposition, the Nazis stepped up the arrests and deportations to a rate of six hundred per day. The adolescent Audrey Hepburn was a terrified witness:

I’d go to the station with my mother to take a train and I’d see cattle trucks filled with Jews ... families with little children, with babies, herded into meat wagons—trains of big wooden vans with just a little slat open at the top and all those faces peering out. On the platform, soldiers herding more Jewish families with their poor little bundles and small children. They would separate them, saying “The men go there and the women go there.” Then they would take the babies and put them in another van. We did not yet know that they were going to their death. We’d been told they were going to be taken to special camps. It was very hard to understand because I was eleven or so. I tell you, all the nightmares I’ve ever had are mingled with that.⁴⁹

The people she saw were mostly being taken to Transit Camp Westerbork, some seventy-five miles northeast of Arnhem, a “holding” center before deportation to Auschwitz and other death camps. Among them were some of her neighbors from Jansbinnensingel.⁵⁰

Non-Jews were victims as well. In May of 1942, seventy-two Dutchmen were executed in a single day for alleged crimes against their oppressors. Scores of others paid with their lives for helping British pilots who were downed over Dutch territory. When Dutch sabotage increased, the Germans announced a new policy of taking and executing hostages if the saboteurs were not turned in.

“The Germans were very good at reprisals,” says Vroemen. “Once they knew they were losing, they were much more brutal to the people in the occupied countries.”

For two years, the van Heemstras had escaped fatalities, but their luck now ran out. After a Dutch underground attempt to blow up a German train, the Nazis took five hostages from different sections of Holland, none of whom had any connection to the sabotage but all of whom had prominent Dutch family names. One of them was Count Otto van Limburg Stirum, an Arnhem magistrate and the husband of Ella’s elder sister, Miesje.

“The Germans thought people with titles were very popular with the population and that they were all connected with the court, which was not true,” says Hako Sixma van Heemstra, a distant relative of Audrey’s and family historian. “The Germans never really knew much about our way of living.”

Uncle Otto was one of Audrey’s favorites. For several weeks, he and the others were held at a monastery in the province of North Brabant. When no one came forth to confess to the train plot, they were taken into the woods and shot on August 15, 1942.⁵¹Her uncle had the grim distinction of being in the first group of civilians executed purely for publicity and retribution.

More reprisals followed, some of which Audrey witnessed in Arnhem, until the horror became almost a routine: “We saw young men put against the wall and shot, and they’d close the street and then open it and you could pass by again.... Don’t discount anything awful you hear or read about the Nazis. It’s worse than you could ever imagine.”⁵²

For self-preservation as well as effective insurgency, more and more Dutchmen were going underground, and her brother Alexander now became one of them. He had no wish to be caught in the round-up of young men—tens of thousands of them—now being “enlisted” to work in the German war industry as forced laborers.

Her younger brother Ian did not escape that fate. He was caught and sent to work fourteen hours a day in a munitions factory in Berlin or—for all his family knew—to his death. Audrey and her mother were beside themselves. After Otto van Limburg Stirum’s arrest and execution, his widow and old Baron van Heemstra left Oosterbeek and moved to a home of the Baron’s called Villa Beukenhof on Rozendaalselaan in the town of Velp. With no other male protection or sanctuary left to them, Ella and Audrey now turned to him in desperation, and he took them in.

Late in life, when an interviewer dwelled on her absent father and “lack of a man,” Audrey bristled: “I had my grandfather and we lived with him; he became the father figure in my life. I adored him. He and I would do very old crossword puzzles, sitting around a little lamp with no heat.”⁵³She remembered those days in Velp as an endless waiting game. “Had we known we were going to be occupied for five years, we might have all shot ourselves. We thought it would be over next week ... six months ... next year.... That’s how we got through.”⁵⁴

That, and by resisting the enemy—in whatever large or small ways they could. Resistance leaders and the queen demanded that Dutchmen “must undo all Nazi measures in the struggle for liberation.” But Dutch Resistance was, in fact, quite late in organizing. The prewar leaders had failed to lay the groundwork for any underground espionage or communications network. Yet the Dutch were masters of obstruction when they wanted to be. Once the movement got going, Dutch youth presented an especially united front: Of 4,500 students at Utrecht University, for example, a total of twenty joined the Dutch Nazi party.

In Arnhem, as elsewhere, the Resistance had many levels and was not highly unified, and the roles played by many of its citizens were ambiguous—including the van Heemstras. It is possible, as later claimed, that Ella engaged in some fund-raising for the cause and may have passed along information from certain of her pro-Nazi friends to the underground. But she is nowhere mentioned in the city’s 2,000 archival files on the subject. Local Resistance leaders must have known of her fascist past and would not have considered her very trustworthy.

The far-fetched report that Ella was overtly pro-fascist in order to hide her covert work in the Resistance is debunked by her own daughter-in-law, Alexander’s wife, Miep, who says Ella’s German sympathies were no cover but a kind of fashion that was “in” for a long time before the invasion of Holland: “Ella was very English, but she was also pro-German. A lot of people in the aristocratic class were pro-German. She even went out with a German general, although it’s said she did this to protect her children, as many did. Later on, she became anti-German.”⁵⁵ David Heringa and his mother, Ella’s Christian Science friends, once dropped by Ella’s and were surprised to find a German officer “who was introduced to us as one of her relations.”⁵⁶

Many Hollanders still cannot accept the fact that, while some actively resisted the Germans, many—perhaps most—did not. The retroactive outrage against “collaborators” contains much hypocrisy and sheds little light. In Ella’s case, it can only be said that she did what she had to do to survive and take care of her children. As a good Dutchwoman, she could not have held on to her erstwhile Nazi views much after her husband’s desertion and her firsthand experience of the occupation. She certainly never benefitted in any way from her former fascist leanings. The bottom line is that no one really knows what Ella was up to politically—if anything—during the war.

More is known about the activities of her daughter; there was never any doubt where Audrey’s sympathies lay. Resistance work was a sensitive subject long after the war ended. From the heroic to the humble, most Netherlanders wanted to forget and not relive the experience. “Interviewers try to bring it up so often, but it’s painful,” she would say. “I dislike talking about it because I feel it’s not something that should be linked to publicity.”⁵⁷ In her case, the publicity put forth after she became a star contained some truth and much melodrama.

“Audrey did have contacts with the underground forces,” confirms historian Vroemen after extensive research of her Arnhem activities, “but there was no espionage. She was only twelve or so, after all. And yet it’s true that youngsters had an advantage because they had less fear and more freedom. I was about eleven, by the middle of the war, and could go where I liked. I was mostly interested in stealing things from the Germans if I got a chance. I’m sure Audrey had similar experiences.”⁵⁸

Chief among the Hepburn legends—and quite true—are her exploits as a courier and occasional secret messenger. Her son Sean remembers that “she told us stories about carrying messages as an eleven-year-old for the Resistance in her shoes.”⁵⁹ Children often did such things, as Vroemen noted, because they could move about with relative freedom, especially going to and from school.

“Once I had to step in and deliver our tiny underground newspaper,” she said. “I stuffed them in my woolen socks in my wooden shoes, got on my bike and delivered them.”⁶⁰ The illegal leaflets came from Dr. Visser ’t Hoofd, a general practitioner and Resistance worker in Velp. Regular shoes were tightly rationed and extremely expensive. Her mother once got her a pair of brown lace-up boots that were two sizes two big, in the hope they’d last longer. “I never grew into them,” Audrey recalled, but she made good use of the extra space inside.⁶¹

Her performing talents were also put to use for the cause and, equally, for herself. In 1943, the Germans confiscated all radios. Thenceforth, in more ways than one, a girl had to make her own music. “I was left to my own devices,” she said, and those devices drew her more deeply into music and dance, “where one didn’t have to talk, only listen.⁶² There was a war, but your dreams for yourself go on [and] I wanted to be a dancer.”

Her personal ambition linked up with the Resistance in a series of “blackout performances” that served both as an outlet for the dancers and a fund-raising activity for the underground: “We would literally do it in somebody’s house with locked windows, drawn blinds. I had a friend who played the piano and my mother would run up costumes out of old curtains and things. I’d do my own choreography—not to be believed!”⁶³

They were her own condensed versions of classic ballets, performed behind locked doors with lookouts posted to watch for German soldiers, several times at the home of Dr. Wouders, a local homeopath, and at least once at her own house. “The best audience I ever had,” she said years later, “made not a single sound at the end of my performance.”⁶⁴ After a silent curtain call, the hat was passed and “the money we made helped saboteurs in their work against the Nazis.”⁶⁵

They were never caught, and Audrey’s involvement in those recitals continued until late in the war when the lack of food weakened her so much she could hardly walk, let alone dance. “Every loyal Dutch schoolgirl and boy did their little bit to help,” she said. “Many were much more courageous than I was. I’ll never forget a secret society of university students called Les Gueux [The Beggars], which killed Nazi soldiers one by one and dumped their bodies in the canals. That took real bravery, and many of them were caught and executed by the Germans. They’re the type who deserve the memorials and medals.”⁶⁶

Neither her days nor her life felt heroic. In later years, and with great emotion, she would identify with Anne Frank, whose life was “very much a parallel to mine”:

[Anne Frank and I] were born the same year, lived in the same country, experienced the same war, except she was locked up and I was on the outside. [Reading her diary] was like reading my own experiences from her point of view. I was quite destroyed by it. An adolescent girl locked up in two rooms, with no way of expressing herself other than to her diary. The only way she could tell the change in season was by a glimpse of a tree through an attic window. ⁶⁷

It was in a different corner of Holland, [but] all the events I experienced were so incredibly accurately described by her—not just what was going on on the outside, but what was going on on the inside of a young girl starting to be a woman ... all in a cage. She expresses the claustrophobia, but transcends it through her love of nature, her awareness of humanity and her love—real love—of life.⁶⁸

Audrey’s favorite passage in the diary, which she could quote from memory, was written in 1944, just six months before Anne Frank was taken to a death camp:

I go to the attic and from my favorite spot on the floor, I look up at the blue sky at the bare chestnut trees on whose branches little raindrops shine, like silver. And I can see gulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists and I may live to see it, this sunshine and the cloudless sky, while it lasts, I cannot be unhappy.... As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know there will be comfort for every sparrow.

Audrey’s comfort came from dance, despite all difficulties and debility. By now it was impossible to buy ballet clothes or shoes, but “as long as there were any old sweaters to pull out, my mother would re-knit my tights,” she said. “Sometimes we were able to buy felt to make slippers, but they never lasted more than two classes.”⁶⁹ She danced endless hours in shoes that were worn to shreds, finally resorting to the only painful alternative—wooden ones.

By 1944 she was Winja Marova’s star pupil, sufficiently advanced to help instruct the youngest students, one of whom was kindergartner Rose-Marie Willems:

“Ballet was something that belonged to your education, like swimming and gymnastics. [Audrey at fourteen] was tall and skinny, with big hands and feet. Her teeth were a little bit crooked, but her big eyes were really remarkable. She was very serious for her age, and she really tried to make something out of the lessons. They had an old gramophone, and she would clap her hands. I wasn’t always the best-behaved child and once in a while [she] would say, ‘You there in the brown suit. Don’t be so bad! You have to behave better.”’⁷⁰

Audrey also gave some under-the-table private lessons in those days, which Winja Marova pretended not to know about. Marova felt her protégée might pass along the wrong technique, but others were doing it too and she couldn’t blame them for trying to earn an extra guilder or two for their families.

One of Audrey’s “private” students was Hesje van Hall, who lived in Velp. The lessons took place in the family dining room, and Hesje’s brother Willem remembers them well: “I was starting puberty then. Audrey was very slender and walked so gracefully. When she came in, the whole house would look different.” ⁷¹

The biggest dance moment of Audrey’s young life came on January 8, 1944, in a student showcase choreographed by Winja Marova at Arnhem’s City Theatre. “Audrey Hepburn-Ruston,” as the program billed her, featured in many numbers, from Burgmüller’s March Militaire to Debussy’s Danseuse de Delphus, returning late in the show for her tour de force—the “Morgenstimmung” (Morning Mood) and “Death of Aase” sections of Grieg’s Peer Gynt.

She was quite “magnificent” that night, says music teacher Carel Wensink, “no doubt the best of Marova’s pupils.” Audrey the dancer was getting better, but things in Arnhem were getting worse. A local fan found her looking “slightly dazed” one day and asked when she had last eaten. “I had some bread yesterday morning,” she said, “but I’m not hungry.” “You’re a very good dancer, but a very poor liar,” he replied.⁷²

Under such circumstances, “I could not go on dancing,” she said. “It was the war diet and the anxiety and the terror.”⁷³ Audrey was growing fast—“really tall, skinny and pale,” Marova says. “She didn’t get the right nutrition, and she fell apart. I agreed with her mother that she should stop dancing temporarily.”

As the war dragged on, food and money became even scarcer. She and her family were now subsisting on watery soup and a kind of “green bread” made from peas. “We ate nettles, and everyone tried to cook grass, only I couldn’t stand it,” she said.⁷⁴ At one point, there was nothing to eat for days but endive, and they thanked God for that. But like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, “I swore I’d never eat it again as long as I lived.”⁷⁵

As AUDREY often said, no one believed the war could last five years. Even less believable was that Arnhem could be the site of the greatest airdrop operation in twentieth-century warfare.

Eight weeks after the June 6, 1944, invasion of Normandy, the Allies reached Paris. Now, with much of Belgium and France liberated, British Field Marshall Montgomery conceived “Operation Market Garden.” It was a bold plan to end the war by Christmas and make military history: A vast number of airborne troops would be dropped behind enemy lines to capture the Dutch towns of Eindhoven, Grave, Nijmegen and Arnhem—and most important, their bridges over the Maas, Waal and Rhine rivers. Land forces would join them for a quick advance into the German heartland and on to Berlin, thus ending the war in a lightning stroke.

The Germans were raggedly retreating east on foot, poorly armed and demoralized. But the Allies failed to finish the job, allowing 80,000 enemy troops to escape into Holland. The Allied command did not imagine how quickly they might reorganize. Nor did they believe Dutch underground reports that two powerful Panzer divisions were regrouping just outside Arnhem.

Five crucial bridges had to be taken, according to Montgomery’s plan. If any one of them failed to fall, so did the entire operation. The 101st U.S. Airborne Division was to capture the bridges by Eindhoven and Veghel, which it did. The 82nd U.S. Airborne was ordered to grab the bridges at Grave and Nijmegen—likewise taken, with great difficulty.

Last and most important was the Rhine bridge in Arnhem, which had been blown up by the Dutch early in the war but since rebuilt. The unenviable task of retaking it was assigned to the First British Airborne Division and the Polish Independent Parachute Brigade Group. The parachutists were ordered to take and defend the Arnhem bridge for forty-eight hours while the ground troops pushed up from the south to join them.

The Battle of Arnhem—the largest air-land operation of the Second World War—began Sunday, September 17, 1944, with the first drop of British paratroopers under the command of Major-General Roy Urquhart, an infantry officer who had never been in command of an airborne division. The Germans were stunned, but the drop had been made some ten kilometers from the center of Arnhem. Every minute is precious in an airborne landing, but this one was afflicted with terrible delays and a failure to capitalize on the Germans’ surprise. Most of the 3,000 men dropped that first day were left on the landing zones. Only one battalion of seven hundred, under Lieutenant-Colonel John Frost, made it to the bridge. Worse, a breakdown of communications equipment left them without information as well as reinforcements.

When the great drop began, many German soldiers ran away in terror, recalls Paul Vroemen, whose best friend was killed that day by a British—not a Nazi—bomb as he was leaving church after Mass. Vroemen remembers the Germans running past his house, shouting, “The tommies are coming!” and throwing down their weapons: “About forty-five minutes later, we saw one lone jeep with some English paratroopers—that was all.” Immediately, the townsfolk began to celebrate, filling the streets, showering the advance guard with flowers and otherwise getting in their way.

But in the next seventy-two hours, Arnhem became a slaughterhouse. Reinforcements in C-47 transports and gliders landed the second day under heavy fire—an incredible feat in which many men lost their lives while floating to earth under their parachutes, easy marks for the German artillery below. The following morning, a desperate attempt was made to break through to Frost’s men at the bridge. But General Urquhart’s troops were simply too far away, forced to defend themselves on three sides at suburban Oosterbeek—including the grounds of the van Heemstra family.

“There was fighting in our garden in Oosterbeek,” says Audrey’s cousin Michael Quarles van Ufford. “My grandfather was an amateur moviemaker, and we have footage of those gliders coming in and people scattered all over the front lawn.”⁷⁶

The Baron was shuttling back and forth between his bomb-damaged properties in both Oosterbeek and Velp. Ella and Audrey were living at the latter place, three miles outside Arnhem, when Audrey was summoned—in view of her good English—to deliver a message to one of many British airmen stranded in the nearby woods. According to a widely published story later, by Audrey’s friend Anita Loos, it happened like this:

Audrey entered the woods, found the paratrooper, explained he was surrounded, and led him to a nearby house for some food. When he could hide no longer, “he gave himself up, refreshed and prepared for his forthcoming ordeal as a prisoner of war,” wrote Loos. “Before they parted, the young man gave Audrey his only possession of value, a silver locket with the Lord’s Prayer engraved on it. After the war, she heard from the young paratrooper and at Christmas, 1947, went to England to visit his family and to receive his mother’s thanks.”⁷⁷

It is a poignant story—and mostly nonsense. Loos was a notorious embellisher. The accurate version is contained in a 1956 Dance magazine article for which Audrey was actually interviewed: She went into the woods to a designated rock, found the man, traded information quickly, and then skipped off, picking flowers. Encountering a German soldier on the way back, she smiled and sweetly handed him her bouquet and proceded on into town to signal a street cleaner that the soldier would be coming in that night to hide out with him.⁷⁸

Similar civilian efforts to aid the British, singly and en masse, were taking place all over the area, which was infested with German units. On Thursday, September 21, the brave and bloody—almost suicidal—landing of General Sosabowski’s Polish parachutists did not improve the situation, which degenerated to streetfighting in Arnhem itself. Heavy fighting raged around St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, where the wounded on both sides were taken and treated, indiscriminately, by Dutch and German doctors alike.

The tide was fast turning against the liberators, many of them now dependent on the townspeople. One of the most desperate was Major Anthony Deane-Drummond, an officer of the First Airborne Division Signals. He had gone into Arnhem to investigate the communications breakdown between Frost and Urquhart but was caught in the fighting and ended up leading the remnants of a company in search of homes in which to hide. Deane-Drummond and three others sought cover in a corner house near the foot of the bridge, at 69 Eusebius Buitensingel. It belonged to Countess Miesje van Limburg Stirum—Otto’s widow and Audrey’s aunt—who had strong reasons to offer help, and did so.

But their asylum was in the eye of the hurricane. The Germans were rushing to reinforce that exact spot, and within hours the Englishmen were trapped. After three days in hiding, with Miesje’s direction, they dashed east to Velp but were caught and detained there in a large manor house with hundreds of other British prisoners. In the confusion, they located a hidden wall space where they managed to elude notice for thirteen days, existing on water and bits of bread. Helpful Dutch servants inside made their plight known to a woman in the adjacent home—Ella van Heemstra—who dug into her father’s secret reserves to provide the men with food on the night they escaped.^g

“On opening up the basket,” wrote Deane-Drummond in his memoirs, “I found a bottle of vintage Krug champagne, a jar full of beef tea and some coffee.... I would have been even more incredulous if someone had told me that the daughter would one day grow up into the beautiful stage and film actress Audrey Hepburn. The delicacies that they had sent round were literally more valuable than gold in wartime Holland, and were freely given to a complete stranger. I later heard that the Heemstra family were themselves suffering shortages of food and that little Audrey was even too weak to dance. Such was true generosity which I will always remember.”⁷⁹

The Deane-Drummond story had a happy ending; the Battle of Arnhem did not. The British defended their ground at Oosterbeek until September 26, when 2,400 men were evacuated back across the Rhine. Frost and his men held the bridge twice as long as they were ordered to, but at a terrible cost. In the end, Allied casualties at Arnhem were far greater than in the D-Day invasion of Normandy—17,000 vs. 12,000. Hundreds of civilians died, as well. Virtually all of Arnhem’s historic buildings were destroyed and 75 percent of its homes left uninhabitable.

The Arnhem invasion has been refought a thousand times on paper: Had the Allies moved in a week earlier, the town might have been taken without a fight. The German officers were incredulous: “If they wanted the bridge,” said one, “why would they land ten kilometers away?” The same question was asked in the Allied high command, where British-American rivalry led both to ignore reliable information from the Dutch underground. As usual in war, the problem was at the top.

Today, the landing zones outside Arnhem look just as they did fifty years ago, green and deceptively inviting. Vroemen points out shell holes and monuments containing the emblems of the various parachute units—the famous Pegasus, for instance, with its inscription: “They shall mount up with wings as eagles,“ from Isaiah 40:31. Some veterans still like to jump, he says. During a recent reunion, one of them—at age seventy-three-did a double.

THE BATTLE was over, but worse was in store for the shell-shocked locals. Expecting a British counterattack over the Rhine at any moment, the Germans now ordered all citizens to leave the town “for their own protection.” If that was humanitarian in part, it was mostly retaliatory: The Germans were enraged by the cooperation and support given the British by the populace.

The evacuation of Arnhem was brutal in the extreme. The day after the British capitulation, every man, woman and child was forced to leave within twenty-four hours or risk being shot on sight. An exodus of 90,000, with what little they could carry on foot, began at dawn. Most headed north toward Apeldoorn, others south or west. Some 3,000 would die on the way to their destinations.

With its people gone, Arnhem was now ransacked. “Special troops came from Germany to do the looting,” says Vroemen. In good German fashion, “they kept a careful, itemized list of what they stole—clothes, raincoats, underwear, shoes. They sent it all to Germany and said it was ‘a gift from the Dutch people.”’

The Germans had taken over the attic and installed a radio transmitter at Baron van Heemstra’s villa in Velp, but Ella and her daughter continued to live there in relative safety, watching the evacuation in horror and doing what they could.

“I still feel sick when I remember the scenes,” Audrey would recall. “It was human misery at its starkest—masses of refugees on the move, some carrying their dead, babies born on the roadside, hundreds collapsing of hunger.... ⁸⁰ 90,000 people looking for a place to live. We took in forty, but ... there was literally nothing to eat.”⁸¹ She was told to drink as much water as she could so her stomach might at least feel full.⁸²

Previous hardships in the Netherlands had been monumental, but that last winter of the war—known in Holland as “the hunger winter”—was the worst by far. Starvation deaths were augmented by a tuberculosis epidemic in early 1945, and the demand for caskets could not be met. Life in Holland was at its lowest ebb, but fifteen-year-old Hepburn felt more hope than despair.

“I wanted to start dancing again,” she said, and so Velp’s village carpenter was asked to put up a barre in one of her grandfather’s rooms with a marble floor. “I gave classes for all ages, and I accepted what was about a dime a lesson. We worked to a gramophone wound by hand.” Some of her pupils lived in the house, and the lessons helped keep their minds off the horror outside. But soon enough, the Germans ordered everybody out: “It was unspeakably hard to turn [them] into the cold night. Even my brother, who was hiding there, had to leave.”⁸³

Her own close brush with disaster came soon after, in March 1945, two months before the liberation, when she was stopped on the street by soldiers with machine guns, rounding up young women to staff their military kitchens. Herded into the group, Audrey and the other sobbing girls were marched toward German headquarters—but poorly guarded.

“I was picked right off the streets with a dozen others,” she said. “As they turned to get more women, I nipped off and ran, and stayed indoors for the next month.”⁸⁴ Her hiding place was not the cellar of the County Council building, as often reported later, but her own home. By the end of the war, she was in broken health but good spirits:

I had jaundice during that last six months. My mother and aunt and I ate very little. We ate a few turnips, we made flour from tulip bulbs, which is actually very fine flour. In the winter there was nothing; in the spring we picked anything we could in the countryside.... ⁸⁵

I was very sick but didn’t realize it. It wasn’t until after the war that I started to realize how my mom must have suffered. She wanted to give me an orange or something. She often looked at me and said, ‘You look so pale.’ I thought she was just fussing, but now I understand how she must have felt.⁸⁶

I was given an outlook on life by my mother.... It was frowned upon not to think of others first. It was frowned upon not to be disciplined.... During the last winter of the war, we had no food whatsoever, and my aunt said to me, “Tomorrow we’ll have nothing to eat, so the best thing to do is stay in bed and conserve our energy.” That very night, a member of the underground brought us food—flour, jam, oatmeal, cans of butter.... When I hit rock-bottom, there [was] always something there for me.⁸⁷

Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. The liberation of Holland was completed four days later on Audrey’s sixteenth birthday, May 4, which also became Holland’s official day of mourning for the victims of the war. Arnhem, largely a ghost town, had been liberated a fortnight earlier. “That was the day I learned that freedom has a bouquet, a perfume all its own —the smell of English tobacco and petrol,” Audrey recalled:⁸⁸

We were in our cellar, where we’d been for weeks. Our area was being liberated practically house to house, and there was lots of shooting and shelling from over the river and constant bombing: explosions going on all night.... Once in a while you’d go up and see how much of your house was left, and then you’d go back under again. Then early in the morning all of a sudden there was total silence. Everybody said, my God, now what’s happening? We listened for a while, and strangely enough, I thought I could hear voices and some singing—and I smelt English cigarettes.⁸⁹

We crept upstairs to the front door, opened it very carefully and to our amazement, our house was completely surrounded by English soldiers, all aiming their guns at us. I screamed with happiness, seeing all these cocky figures with dirty bright faces and shouted something in English. The corporal or sergeant walked up to me, and in a very gentle English voice—so different from all the German shouting we’d been used to—said, “We hear you have a German radio station in your house and we’ve come to take it away. We’re sorry to disturb you.” I laughed and said, “Go right on disturbing us.” Then a cheer went up that they’d liberated an English girl. I was the only one for miles.⁹⁰

Equally vivid in her memory of liberation day were the seven chocolate bars given to her by an English soldier. She ate them all at once—and was violently ill. Far better nutritionally was the food she and thousands of others received soon after from the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the forerunner of UNICEF. Her commitment to that organization began then and there. She would never forget the first two incongruous things they gave her: condensed milk and cigarettes.⁹¹

“They filled the schools [with] UNRRA crates—boxes of food that we were allowed to take home, and blankets, medication and clothes,” she said. “I remember going to a huge classroom where we could pick out clothes, sweaters and skirts, and they were so pretty and had come from America. We thought, how could people be so rich to give away things that looked so new?⁹²

“I remember lots of flour and butter and oatmeal and all the things that we hadn’t seen in ages! ... One of the first meals I had was oatmeal made with canned milk, and I put so much sugar on it and I ate a whole plateful and was deadly ill afterwards because I couldn’t absorb it. I wasn’t used to rich food anymore. I was hardly used to food anymore, let alone that kind of thing. But it was everything we dreamed of. ”⁹³

She was sixteen years old, five-foot-six and weighed ninety pounds. After five years, she was suffering from asthma, jaundice and other diseases stemming from malnutrition, including anemia and severe edema, a swelling of the joints and limbs in which the blood literally turns to water. “It begins with your feet,” Audrey recounted clinically, “and when it reaches your heart, you die. With me it was above the ankles when we were liberated.”⁹⁴

She was also having problems with colitis and irregular periods—possibly endometriosis, common among women dancers and athletes with little body fat—and her metabolism would be permanently affected. In some ways, she would never fully recover from the war: To the end of her life, she never weighed more than 110 pounds. It would be claimed that she also suffered from some form of anorexia or bulimia, of which the war was the source; and that she later deprived herself of, or felt she could do without, food. (See Chapter 9, pp. 303-304.)

But past and future pain were set aside for the moment, in celebration of the present. A few nights after the liberation, Canadian troops plugged a projector into an outdoor electric generator in the town square and—to the joy of Audrey and her teenage friends—gave them an alfresco screening of the first Hollywood film they had seen since before the war.

Audrey and Ella’s joy was more profound a few weeks later when Alexander suddenly emerged from years as an onderduiker—in underground hiding—with a pregnant wife. On July 17, 1945, Audrey became an aunt with the birth of their son Michael. More miraculously, soon after, Ian showed up at their door—having walked most of the 325 miles from Berlin to Arnhem. Five thousand Dutch boys sent for forced labor in Germany had died there. Ian’s family now thanked God that he was not one of them.

“We had almost given up,” said Audrey, “when the doorbell rang and it was Ian....⁹⁵ We lost everything, of course—our houses, our possessions, our money. But we didn’t give a hoot. We got through with our lives, which was all that mattered.”⁹⁶

As SOON AS it was possible to do so, they returned to Arnhem and their little house at 8A Jansbinnensingel. “Unfortunately,” Audrey concluded, “people basically learn little from war. We needed each other so badly that we were kind, we hid each other, we gave each other something to eat. But when it was over, people were just the same—gossipy and mean.”⁹⁷

But Audrey was neither of those, and she was exhilarated by the existential liberation that came with the military one: “Life started again and all the things you’d never had, never seen, never eaten, never worn, started to come back again. That was such a stimulus.”⁹⁸ So was the freedom to choose and do what she wished.

Her first choice, in the summer of 1945, was to volunteer for work in the Royal Military Invalids Home, a facility for injured and retired veterans in the Arnhem suburb of Bronbeek. It was, and remains, a sprawling, beautiful white structure, built in 1862 by King Willem III, Queen Wilhelmina’s father. There, Audrey helped minister to soldiers of many nationalities, one of whom would happily link up with her twenty-two years later.

“While she was being shelled in Arnhem, I was in a tank a few miles away,” said Terence Young, the future director of a fine thriller called Wait Until Dark. “We were stuck on that single road into the town and never able to come to the relief of the unfortunate parachutists stuck there.”⁹⁹

Wounded in the last weeks of the war, Young was now lying in the Arnhem hospital. “In the next room to mine,” he recalled, “was a legendary figure in the parachute regiments, ‘Mad Mike’ Calvert, a brigadier general. When he found out I was a filmmaker, he asked me about doing a film on Arnhem. That same afternoon, director Brian Desmond Hurst arrived with the head of Gaumont-British news to ask if I would write a script about Arnhem, using the real-life characters.”

The resulting Men of Arnhem, codirected by Hurst and Young, is one of the most powerful of all World War II documentaries, and though Audrey had nothing to do with it, she had her own encounter with those filmmakers at the time. In September 1945, recalls David Heringa, Audrey’s friend from the Christian Science classes, “her mother brought her to our house to see if we could introduce her to some big shots of Gaumont-British who were staying with us and making [Men of Arnhem]. But they could only suggest [that she] continue ballet lessons and then, when things were more normal, come to England. We all thought Mother van Heemstra a bit pushy about Audrey.” ¹⁰⁰

Characterizations of Ella were always remarkably consistent. With typical resilience, she now reapplied herself to Audrey’s career, which could no longer be served in the ruins of Arnhem. At twenty-five and twenty-one, her brothers were on their own. Alexander worked first in government reconstruction projects and then in Indonesia for British Petroleum Matape. Ian joined the multinational firm Unilever (a merger of Britain’s Lever Brothers and the Dutch Margarine Company), whose postwar product line featured such previously unavailable delicacies as peanut butter. Only Audrey remained in the nest—and Ella decided it was time to move the nest to Amsterdam.

No great immediate prospects awaited most of the thousands of displaced Hollanders who jammed that city in October of 1945. But Ella had a large network of friends and was not too proud to take the first honest work she could find, which turned out to be cook-housekeeper for a wealthy family who also provided her a small basement flat. She soon left for a slightly better post as a florist’s shop manager, and a slightly better apartment nearby.

The overriding reason for relocating to Amsterdam was Audrey: Winja Marova had given her a glowing recommendation to study with Sonia Gaskell, then the leading name in Dutch ballet. Holland had been on the cutting edge of dance since 1658 when “The Ballet of Maidens” featured female dancers, decades before women were allowed on stage in more sophisticated Paris.

In that tradition, Gaskell nowadays ran a school and soon founded a company that would evolve into the Netherlands (Dutch National) Ballet.^h “The classic dance is dead,” she declared. Gaskell’s school was known in Europe and America for avant-garde choreography and the hard-edged modern music to which it was often set—jazz and atonal included. She was also adept at discovering, encouraging and harboring young talent.

Audrey was one of her discoveries and now joined Gaskell’s “Balletstudio ’45,” where she danced classroom roles to such dissimilar composers as Bach, Debussy, Villa-Lobos, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, sometimes choreographing the exercises herself. Audrey, said Gaskell, “had no money to pay for the lessons. Yet I thought she deserved a chance. In the two floors of studio space below my apartment, I found her a tiny room in which she barely could move, but she loved it and became a very serious pupil.”¹⁰¹ What Audrey learned from Gaskell was “the work ethic—don’t complain, don’t give in even if you’re tired, don’t go out the night before you have to dance. Sonia taught me that if you really worked hard, you’d succeed, and that everything had to come from the inside.”¹⁰²

In May 1946, Audrey was chosen to dance with Gaskell’s top student star, Beatrix Leoni, in a matinee performance at Amsterdam’s Hortus Theater. “She didn’t have a lot of great technique,” wrote the Algemeen Handelsblad newspaper critic of her three solos, “but she definitely had talent.”

For her seventeenth birthday that month, Ella gave her a season ticket for the upcoming season of Amsterdam’s great Concertgebouw Orchestra, and for Christmas she got tickets to a series of Beethoven string quartets. Her living arrangement with Gaskell ended. She was back with her mother and so broke that she couldn’t even afford to ride the tram, but even in the most inclement weather, she walked the considerable distance from their flat to the Concertgebouw and never missed a concert.ⁱ

She often took along Anneke van Wijk, her friend and fellow dance student. Van Wijk remembers her as a hard worker who practiced incessantly—sponta—neous, funny, cultivated and never arrogant or competitive to the point of rivalry:

“Audrey’s expression was fabulous. The way she used her hands and eyes showed that she also had talent for acting. Her enormous eyes were not to be believed. I asked her once, ‘What are you doing to make them seem so wide?’ She said, ‘Nothing. They’ve always been this way.’”¹⁰³ When van Wijk knew her, she was just “a normal Dutch girl with chubby cheeks,” by no means heavy but not thin, either. “I remember that because I used to take showers with her after the lessons. It wasn’t until later, when she started to act, that she became so skinny.”

Van Wijk thought they were both a bit old to be starting with Gaskell and that they had lost too much time because of the war. Partly with that in mind, she and her husband introduced Audrey to photographer Helena Voute, at whose studio Audrey began to do some posing. With her innate stage presence and good posture, she quickly developed her natural feel for it.

Ella was still moving around considerably in those days. Her network of friends included the Heineken brewery family, whose son Freddie recalls seeing Audrey and passing along the esoteric skill he was then cultivating:

“I gave her her first tap-dance lesson. Her nickname was Rimple, for some reason, because when she laughed, she had a little dimple or ‘rimple.’ She and Ella lived for a while in Noordwijk [just southwest of Amsterdam], where I lived, too. They spent a lot of time at my mother’s house. Ella was taking care of our little poodle. She was a funny, down-to-earth woman with enormous problems. I don’t think Audrey would have gotten anywhere without her.”¹⁰⁴

Ella was now subsidizing her daughter’s lessons by doing facials and makeup at the fashionable beauty salon of P. C. Hoofstraat. By one account, she was also selling cosmetics door-to-door. For a time, Audrey developed a little avocation as a hatmaker, selling her creations to her mother’s clients.

“Audrey had exquisite taste,” said her friend Loekie van Oven, a Gaskell dancer who was several years older and took her under her wing. “She and her mother had no money, but they had class and style. Audrey used to go to department stores in Amsterdam and buy plain-looking hats and, with her artistic talent, easily change them into something really nice.”¹⁰⁵

Audrey and Loekie spent a lot of time together, talking and dreaming. As there was never enough money for proper dance gear, “We used to wear ballet shoes made by a Belgian shoemaker that were like wooden shoes—very heavy. Audrey was quite ingenious. She used to make tights from Ace bandages and dye them by soaking them in water with red crepe paper.”¹⁰⁶

Audrey in Amsterdam was “very shy and withdrawn,” says van Oven, partly because of her monastic living conditions and lack of money, but mostly because of the strict nature of ballet life itself: “Love or érotique do not play an important part in it.... It had nothing to do with sexuality. We flirted sometimes, but that was it. The dancing was physically very fatiguing, so we had to put all our energy into that. Dancing was everything for Audrey.... She could put a spell on an audience and subdue them. There was poetry and motion in anything she touched.”

Though Audrey was ambitious, Loekie felt she chafed at the even greater ambition of her mother. Ella longed for a return to prominence in the class in which she (and Audrey, for that matter) had been raised. She wanted Audrey to meet more of “the right kind of people” and preferably to marry one of them. Her pressure contributed to Audrey’s withdrawal, says van Oven: “A lot of people thought it was interesting and exciting to know the daughter of a baroness. But Audrey didn’t want to have anything to do with that. She really kept her distance from it.”

Audrey was one of Gaskell’s best and favorite pupils, but not everyone was happy with the mistress. Gaskell believed a dancer’s expression “was prettier when the person felt bad,” says van Oven, and often helped to induce such feelings. Dancer Ida de Jong, who had attended Gaskell’s school before the war, gone to England and then returned to Gaskell in 1948, calls her “not very kind.” When Ida later left to join the Dutch Opera ballet, “Sonia never spoke to me again.”¹⁰⁷

More than once before leaving, Ida told Audrey, “You must not stay in Holland—you must go to England. You’ll have a lot more opportunities there, and you don’t have to ask to come in because you are half English.”¹⁰⁸ As an afterthought, she added that Audrey could also get movie parts in London, which was “an easy way to make some money.”

Immigration into Britain was then quite difficult indeed, requiring much documentation and a work permit. But Ida was right: With a British father and British passport, Audrey could go there if she chose, and after almost three years with Gaskell, she finally decided to do so. During a short preliminary visit to London with her mother, she auditioned for the celebrated Marie Rambert ballet school and was accepted, with scholarship.

The bad news was that she would have to pay her own living expenses. That, combined with Ella’s current financial crunch, meant her enrollment would have to be postponed, and Audrey was hugely disappointed. But the goal was in sight.