WHO IS AUDREY, WHAT IS SHE�
Huis Doom, originally the property of the Van Heemstra family, and the last refuge of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.
1
I was a very ordinary-looking little girl â thin, bony, straight-haired, bewildered
AUDREY HEPBURN
Audrey Hepburn fits none of the clichés and none of the clichés fits her
TIME MAGAZINE
Clues to Audrey Hepburnâs originality are to be found in the background and events that shaped her. She was born on 4 May 1929, to parents who, in the words of writer Charles Higham, âconstituted a slightly indelicate pairing of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisieâ. The baby daughter, christened Edda Kathleen Van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston, was a âlong babyâ with the âprettiest laughing eyesâ. From the outset, she was fragile, quiet and shy â âa changeling in a family of sturdy charmersâ.
The âindelicate pairingâ referred to by Higham was that of J.A. Hepburn-Ruston, a highly-placed Anglo-Irish banker, divorced and reportedly irresistible to women, and the Baroness Ella Van Heemstra, a Dutch aristocrat of distinguished lineage, divorced, the mother of two small sons, and still young and beautiful.
The Van Heemstras, a long line of wealthy, land-owning Dutch aristocrats, had close connections with the Royal household, which several of them had served in various capacities. The men distinguished themselves in the military, in government administration and in the law. They were proud, dutiful, honourable and cultivated people.
Audreyâs mother was the third daughter of Baron Aarnoud Van Heemstra, a dignified and eminent lawyer who attended at the Court of Queen Wilhelmina. He had been, for a time, the Burgomaster of Arnhem, and was afterwards appointed to the governership of Dutch Guiana (later Suriname), which colony he ruled with distinction from 1921 to 1928.
In 1896, he had married Elbrig Van Asbeck, a baroness in her own right, whose antecedents could be traced to the twelfth century and included Hungarian, French and Jewish stock. Aarnoud and Elbrig had five daughters (one of whom became lady-in-waiting to Queen Juliana) and a son. This sizeable brood spent much of their childhood on one of the large family estates at Doom in Utrecht, living in a splendid castle surrounded by a moat and several hundred acres of verdant countryside.
Today, Het Kasteel De Doom, as the castle was known, is called simply Huis-Doorn, and is open to the public as a stately home-cum-museum. It figures in the history books as the last refuge of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who bought it from Baroness Elbrig Van Heemstra soon after his flight from Germany towards the end of World War I. At this time, 1918, the Van Heemstras had moved residence to another of their ancestral estates near Arnhem where, in 1920, their daughter Ella married the Honourable Jan Van Ufford, also a distinguished aristocrat and servant of the Royal household.
This was a stormy union, which ended in divorce five years and two sons later. Baroness Ella Van Heemstra, as she reverted to calling herself, and her boys, Alexander and Ian, spent periods of time with her parents in Suriname. There she met Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, who, as managing director of the Brussels branch of the Bank of England, was closely concerned with the administration of the Van Heemstrasâ financial affairs and properties.
The couple were married in Batavia (now Jakarta) in September 1926, and in due course took up residence outside Brussels. It was here, in a large, elegant and gracious nineteenth-century house, set in attractive grounds, that their first and only child was born. Despite the proverbial silver spoon in her mouth, she displayed neither the robust physicality that characterises the Dutch nor the confident, outgoing personality that went with her lineage.
Audrey Hepburnâs later life bore, to a pronounced degree, all the marks of a childhood and adolescence that turned out to be a striking amalgam of privilege and deprivation. Inculcated with the breeding, culture, discipline and history of the Van Heemstras (whose portraits graced the walls of art galleries and museums as well as those of fine private houses), spending her early years in luxurious and idyllic surroundings, she wanted for nothing. She loved her half-brothers, in whose company she lost her shyness and played the tomboy with evident relish; her relationship with her mother was a close one, which she later admitted had the greatest influence on her. The attachment remained strong until Ellaâs death in 1984.
Mother Ella and baby Audrey.
Little Audrey. No sign of the wraith-like beauty to come.
However, Baroness Van Heemstra was as formidable as she was admirable. She acted as the strong-willed guardian of her daughterâs interests, and her disagreement over certain issues, notably the men in Audreyâs life, made for periodic difficulties. Towards the end of her life, Audrey, who was always driven by the need for love and affection, spoke of her mother in an American television interview with Professor Richard Brown: âIt is true that I had an extraordinary mother. She herself was not a very affectionate person in the sense that I today consider affection. I spent a lot of time looking for it â and I found it. She was a fabulous mother but she came from an era â she was born in 1900, Victorian influence still â of great discipline, of great ethics ⊠a lot of love within her, not always able to show it. And very strict.â
When Ella Van Heemstra was growing up, her father held the traditional view that well-born young women avoided having any truck with the stage and the people connected with it. They were not considered respectable. The independent-minded Baroness no longer shared this opinion. Her authoritarian style of parenting notwithstanding, she encouraged her daughterâs early enthusiasms for music and dance, and supported her later ambitions.
While still a tiny child, Audrey manifested a passionate love of animals, flowers and the countryside, which endured throughout her life. Other than enjoying games with her brothers, she was a solitary little girl, preferring to play with kittens, puppies and rabbits rather than other children. Reclusive and hypersensitive, she reacted badly to tensions and unhappiness, yet was capable of enjoyment, high spirits, and an impish and infectious sense of humour. A daydreamer who loved dressing up in her motherâs clothes, she was keenly responsive to music and, as soon as she was able to read, became an avid bookworm, much influenced by her brother Ian.
Their shared enthusiasm for books was one of the few private memories that she articulated in detail in later years, telling the London Evening News, âHeâs the original bookworm and when we were children he was devoted to Kipling. I admired him so much that I read all Kiplingâs books because I wanted to be like him ⊠The result was that I had read nearly every book by Edgar Wallace and E. Phillips Oppenheim before I was 13. Those were real adventure books, and to me as a girl they had far more appeal than âTopsy Goes to Schoolâ.â
This strong response to literature, combined with her refusal to play with dolls, which she considered âsillyâ, are early indications of the paradoxes that would come to characterise her image and persona in later years. The girl who hated dolls would grow to love children and long for her own; the taste for exciting thrillers and adventure stories was superseded by her devotion to fairy stories. She said, in the same interview, âIf I ever want to accentuate the importance of anything in any form of entertainment, it is the quality of the fairy tale ⊠people go to the theatre and the cinema for the same reason that makes them like fairy tales â the sense of watching something that isnât real. The fairy tale is, to my mind, the core of entertainment.â
Early childhood, then, was protected and comfortable, a period of privileged play in wonderful surroundings, nurtured by nannies, governesses, and private tutors. Time was divided between the family estates in Belgium and Holland and, from the age of four, England, where she was taken during the winter months. But a shadow was cast over this seemingly perfect existence by tensions which arose in her parentsâ marriage. By all accounts, the major cause of strife between the Hepburn-Rustons was the husbandâs method of handling his wifeâs financial affairs. Conflict degenerated into open quarrel, creating an atmosphere that clearly distressed Audrey. During her fatherâs frequent absences abroad on bank business, she seemed happy enough within the limitations of her grave and shy personality, but his homecomings upset the child. She would then withdraw into her shell, hiding in the nearby fields and, in a classic syndrome of misery, eating compulsively. Chocolates were a particular favourite and, despite her almost painful thinness throughout most of her life, she went through a period of ungainly puppy fat.
In 1935, when Audrey was six, without preamble or explanation, her father left the household never to return. He settled in London, where his upper-class social circle included Sir Oswald and Lady Diana Mosley and Hitlerâs girlfriend Unity Mitford. He forged ever closer links with these acquaintances, and became a wholehearted supporter of Mosleyâs Fascist movement, marching with the British Black Shirts. His daughterâs views on this turn of events have not been made public. Apparently, when World War II was over he was living in Ireland, but there are conflicting accounts as to whether or not she ever saw him again after the outbreak of the war.
Meanwhile, and contrary to expectation, when her parentsâ divorce was finalised some considerable time after Hepburn-Rustonâs exit, he insisted on regular access to his daughter. The practical outcome of the settlement was that Audrey, not yet ten, shy, jittery, self-consciously critical of her appearance and temperamentally unsuited to the rigours of a hearty, hockey-playing English educational establishment, was shipped off to an exclusive girlsâ boarding school near London. With the unyielding determination to put a positive gloss on a negative situation that coloured all her public comments, she confessed many years later that she had been âterrifiedâ, but that âit ended up being a good lesson in independenceâ.
In the event, Audreyâs relatively brief sojourn at the school proved of profound significance to her future. The strict regime, academic demands and communal living for so reclusive a young girl must have been a shock to the system. She had been a sickly child and now developed the migraine headaches that would continue to plague her. But the difficulties of adjustment were quickly compensated for by the ballet lessons she began to take at the school. When Baroness Van Heemstra arrived to meet her daughter at the end of the first term, she found a new Audrey: lively, enthusiastic and obsessed with dance. From that moment on, ballet became her passion, Pavlova her heroine and stardom her aspiration.
London broadened her horizons in other directions. She was taken to the major historical monuments such as the Tower and learned about the queens who had perished there; she visited the National Gallery, enjoyed the Zoo at Regentâs Park (nearby to where Ella rented an apartment), experienced the thrills of Madame Tussaudâs, and responded with enthusiasm to that uniquely British form of entertainment the Christmas pantomime.
The pattern of Audreyâs life seemed set for several years to come when, on 3 September 1939, Britain declared war on Hitlerâs Germany. Baroness Van Heemstra, fearing a Nazi invasion of England, prevailed upon her ex-husband to send their daughter back to Holland in the interests of her safety â not just Holland, but Arnhem, a city close to the German border which would have to endure some of the severest consequences of the Occupation.
But the irony of Baroness Van Heemstraâs decision didnât become apparent until the following spring. In September 1939, Arnhem was a delightful city of historic associations and fine medieval architecture, bordered by lovely woodlands and gentle hills rather than the characteristically dull, flat landscape of the country. In addition to museums, art galleries, historic homes and old churches, there were parks, ablaze with tulips in the spring and summer, and a local symphony orchestra. And, of course, the bridge, to become famous as the scene of a brutal defeat for an Allied invasion.
Arnhem was a city of English affiliations. Several English families had settled there in the seventeenth century, and the famous poet and soldier Sir Philip Sidney died there. Baroness Van Heemstra became president of the local branch of the British-Netherlands Society, a position that provided fertile ground for sowing the seeds of wartime resistance in which she would soon be heavily engaged.
When Audrey arrived to join her mother and brothers, she found herself living in one of the comfortable family estates just outside the city. She was enrolled at the Arnhem Day School to continue her education, a routine step for a ten-year-old girl, but one that presented her with severe difficulties since she had not learned to speak Dutch. Recalling her first days at the school, she described how she âsat at my little bench completely baffled. For several days I went home weeping. But I knew I couldnât just give up. I was forced to learn the language quickly. And I did.â
Rather more happily for the girl, her mother arranged for her to pursue her ballet lessons at the Arnhem Conservatory of Music and Dance. If the teaching was undistinguished, it was sufficient to give Audrey a much-needed training in posture, to strengthen her spine, and to loosen up the stiffness which was a heavy liability for a would-be ballerina. Her feet and ankles were weak but, drawing on her characteristic steely determination, she worked at strengthening them sufficiently to allow her to dance on point.
By the spring of 1940, the war clouds were rumbling over Holland. Uniformed soldiers tramped the streets, barbed-wire barricades were erected across the Dutch fields (visible near the Van Heemstra home), the quiet was periodically shattered by gunfire from the borders. That same spring, in the face of serious danger, the Sadlerâs Wells Ballet was touring Holland and arrived to perform in Arnhem. The courageous company, in the charge of the illustrious choreographer and teacher Ninette (later Dame Ninette) De Valois a...