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  Finally, Hitler spoke and laid his soul bare speaking about his love for Germany and his hopes and dreams for the future. He pointed out that the world’s problems centered around the Jews who had manipulated nations into the Great War, which had culminated in the defeat of Germany and then the Great Depression. The Parteitag concluded with a tattoo, a stirring, masculine presentation by the drum corps, and then Hitler climbed into a touring car and was driven all the way around the inside of the stadium to be worshiped by the throngs.

  With the Party Congress concluded, Ella ventured back to Munich to bask in Hitler’s presence at, among other places, his favorite restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria, and passed her time with Unity Mitford, Unity’s SS boyfriend Erich Widmann, and Citizen reporter Micky Burn. Unity was so incredibly territorial over Hitler that she kept the others at bay so she could have the Führer all to herself, but Ella didn’t need the great man’s attention; she had already met him, and she returned home to Belgium where she took pen in hand.

  Wrote Ella: “What struck me most forcibly among the million and one impressions I received there were: (a) the wonderful fitness of every man and woman one saw, on parades or in the street; and (b) the refreshing atmosphere around one, the absolute freedom from any form of mental pressure or depression.”

  Ella’s words would boom in Sir Oswald’s National Socialist newsletter, Action, as she concluded: “Well may Adolf Hitler be proud of the rebirth of this great country and of the rejuvenation of the German spirit. The Germany of today is a most present country, and the Germans, under Nazi rule, a splendid example to the white races of the world—a mighty people, upright and proud, as indeed, they have every right to be.” And to these stirring words she affixed the Belgian version of her name, Baroness Ella de Heemstra, Brussels.*

  *See the chapter notes for a description of sources consulted.

  2

  The Blood of Frisia

  Audrey Kathleen van Heemstra Ruston, future shining Hollywood star, entered the world under a different kind of star, a dark one, on 4 May 1929. Her mother, Ella, Baroness van Heemstra, was a strong-willed, plain-speaking, high-spirited colt of a woman who at age twenty-eight still felt the need to sow wild oats, despite the fact she was now the mother of three, counting sons Alexander and Ian from her first marriage. In Ella’s veins—in the veins of all the van Heemstras—raced Frisian blood. Frisia, known as Friesland to the Dutch, is a unique province in the far north of the Netherlands. Even today many Frisians bristle at being referred to as Dutch at all—they’re too unique and independent for such a common classification.

  That Audrey Hepburn should one day become an accomplished personage known around the world isn’t surprising considering her bloodlines among Frisian nobility.* The first Frisian van Heemstra found in records came long before William of Orange, under whose reign the Netherlands coalesced. Van Heemstras were recognized as nobility from the beginning, from the Middle Ages, and the title of baron was granted officially in 1814 to Willem Hendrik van Heemstra, whose son Schelto, Baron van Heemstra, represented Friesland in the Dutch House of Representatives before becoming prime minister of the Netherlands in 1861. Another son, Frans, Baron van Heemstra, also served in the House of Representatives. Frans’ son W.H.J., Baron van Heemstra, had two sons, one of whom was Aarnoud Jan Anne Aleid—or A.J.A.A., Baron van Heemstra—father of Ella along with four other daughters and a son. This baron was Audrey’s grandfather, or opa, as the position is known in Dutch.

  By 1900 van Heemstra had become a family name of national honor in Holland. The path to wealth for Dutchmen cut through the East Indies, but Aarnoud went his own way and obtained a doctorate of law in 1896, the same year he married Elbrig Willemina Henriette, Baroness van Asbeck. Aarnoud set up practice as a prosecuting attorney and then became a judge in the prosperous city of Arnhem on the Rhine, capital of the province of Gelderland, forty miles west of the German border. As he pursued his practice, the Baroness van Asbeck produced babies—Wilhelmina Cornelia (1897), Geraldine Caroline (1898), Ella (1900), Marianne Jacqueline (1903), Willem Hendrik (1907), and Arnoudina Johanna (1911). By now the father of six had become burgemeester, or mayor, of Arnhem, a position he held for ten years until 1920. The family lived in a beautiful villa beside the Lauwersgracht, a lake that was all that remained of a moat that once encircled the ancient walled city of Arnhem. Now the lake belonged to the Park Musis Sacrum in the city center, the most picturesque spot in all of Arnhem. The van Heemstra home was one of three in the “Paadje van Bleckmann,” villas owned by a wealthy local family named Bleckmann. Another of these villas, known as de Nijenburgh, was occupied by Cornelia, Countess van Limburg Stirum. The baron’s daughter Wilhelmina married the countess’s nephew, Otto Ernst Gelder, Count van Limburg Stirum, in 1918, meaning that the van Heemstra family presence was both strong and close in Arnhem Centraal, overlooking the Rhine. In another twenty-six years these three grand villas of the van Heemstra and van Limburg Stirum families would be soaked in blood and destroyed in the most romanticized battle of the Second World War.

  Under Burgemeester van Heemstra’s direction, Arnhem prospered. The land development association Nederlandsche Heidemaatschappij chose the city for its headquarters, the soon-to-be-famous Openlucht Museum and Burgers’ Zoo were established, and affordable housing became prevalent.

  In March 1920 Aarnoud gave his daughter Ella’s hand in marriage to Hendrik Gustaaf Adolf Quarles van Ufford of Oosterbeek, the next town over. Hendrik was a former horse cavalryman and now an oil executive assigned to the Dutch East Indies. After the nuptials the couple set sail for the Far East to begin a new life together. Later that same year Burgemeester van Heemstra, who was something of a penny-pincher, suddenly relinquished his office in a squabble with the city over money. He stated that “the meager salary does not allow me to continue to do my job properly.” He returned to law but not for long. The Netherlands’ Queen Wilhelmina of the House of Oranje appointed Aarnoud to be governor of the Dutch territory of Suriname on the northeast coast of South America, so the baron, baroness, and three of the van Heemstra children set sail for what would become a tumultuous eight years in the far-flung Suriname capital, Paramaribo.

  Aarnoud was a charismatic aristocrat. Ella described her father as “about the most handsome man I ever saw. They say he is brilliantly clever. He forms his witty remarks in a French way. On Sundays he looks subdued but bubbling over with mischief. His teeth look very white behind a small black moustache.”

  The new governor of Suriname had spent his life among northern Europeans and now had to deal with a South American melting pot that included native Indians and escaped slaves, called Maroons, who had formed their own independent villages in the abundant rain forests of the interior. Administering this wild area meant keeping bauxite mines producing aluminum and also ensuring the stability of rice and banana crops, and all three required lots of muscle from either free men or indentured servants. Prior governors had been figureheads, but not Governor van Heemstra, who undertook several expeditions deep into the interior—places where white Europeans rarely were seen. He took an active interest because the baron was a visionary who saw the economic potential of Suriname. He pushed hard for financial independence at the expense of a Netherlands government that he correctly labeled as disinterested in this “unimportant” piece of real estate—the real money was to be made in thriving Dutch East Indies enterprises that produced coffee, tea, cacao, tobacco, and rubber.

  Governor van Heemstra remained a progressive who worked tirelessly on behalf of his colony. His work ethic would be seen a generation later in his young granddaughter. In 1922 van Heemstra welcomed the Aluminum Company of America, better known as Alcoa, into the Moengo forest to mine bauxite. But the honeymoon between the governor and Alcoa was short-lived: He realized almost at once that danger lurked in this U.S. company monopolizing Suriname resources.

  In 1924 he traveled to Germany to negotiate with the Stinnes group, a powerful mining conglomerate. His
goal was to interest the Germans in bauxite mining in the colony, figuring a second company on hand would check the aggressive Americans. But the Dutch government feared that once the equally bold and enterprising Germans got in, they might try a total takeover, and so van Heemstra was ordered to break off contact.

  His worries during these years weren’t just political. His wife’s health was in decline, and then he learned that his third daughter on the other side of the world, Ella, had decided to divorce her husband of five years, Hendrik Quarles van Ufford, after producing two sons. Unexpectedly, Ella showed up at the governor’s mansion in Paramaribo with her children after a transoceanic voyage.

  Ella had become at age twenty-five a handsome and opinionated young woman with strong drives who took one look at life in primitive Suriname, said no thank you, and set sail on a return voyage back across the world to the Dutch East Indies with sons Alex and Ian in tow. Aarnoud waved good-bye while continuing to battle the mother country at every turn, holding the Americans at bay with one arm and the Germans with the other. When he tried to increase taxes on Alcoa for its bauxite exports, the Dutch government said no, while also placing Shell Oil on the shoulders of the governor as a new worry. That was it. Governor van Heemstra resigned to become Baron van Heemstra once more and returned to Arnhem’s neighbor, the resort village of Oosterbeek, with wife and family.

  Meanwhile, Ella had been drawn back to the Dutch East Indies by an intriguing thirty-four-year-old English ne’er-do-well named Joseph Ruston, a married man whom she had met and couldn’t get out of her mind. When she showed up once more in the East Indies following the visit to Suriname, Ruston divorced his wife, and Joseph and Ella were married in September 1926.

  Ruston had been born in Bohemia in 1889 of an English father and German mother. He may have casually mentioned to Baroness Ella that he was descended from the third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots. That English noble was James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell. Ella loved the idea of being connected to British nobility and insisted that he adopt the name Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, which she would then use as well to become Ella, Baroness van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston. He agreed to such use, but never in writing.

  Ruston was Bohemian in more ways than one. He had come from money but didn’t seem to have any, which might have given Ella a glimpse of their life ahead. From the Dutch East Indies the couple began a years-long global odyssey that featured Ruston’s disdain for holding a steady position and then his eventual realization that the van Heemstras of Frisia were not weighed down by large bank accounts and treasure chests of family jewels. In fact, the only gold to be found anywhere around a van Heemstra gleamed on the impressive family coat of arms. Otherwise, they would be called upper middle class, and that didn’t suit Ruston at all.

  Eventually, Ruston began a position with tin merchants Maclaine, Watson and Company, working first in London and then in Brussels. It was here that their only child together, Audrey—known to her family as Adriaantje—was born in spring 1929. The first crisis faced by mother and new daughter occurred at day twenty-one, when whooping cough stopped the baby’s heart. Ella’s response was classically her: An avid Christian Scientist, she didn’t bother calling a doctor. Instead, she held her daughter upside down like a newborn and began spanking her. Somehow it worked, and Adriaantje gasped for breath and began screaming. The episode would be prophetic of Ella’s power over her daughter from this instant until Audrey drew her last breath sixty-three years later.

  With Ruston aloof and Ella a typically forceful Frisian in the mold of her opinionated and outgoing father, Adriaantje couldn’t help but grow up Dutch in key ways. Her opa, the baron, had been born near Utrecht; her mother in Velp, the village just east of Arnhem. Half brothers Alex and Ian were the sons of a Quarles van Ufford from stately Oosterbeek, just on the western side of Arnhem. The Ruston family—Joseph, Ella, Alex, Ian, and Adriaantje—were always on the move between Brussels, London (Joseph’s adopted home), and Arnhem, which remained home base not only for Opa but also second cousin Schelte, Baron van Heemstra, and his wife, Mathilde Jacoba, Baroness van Heemstra van Oosterzee, known to the family as Tilly.

  In fact, the Dutch province of Gelderland was crawling with titled kin—van Heemstras and Quarles van Uffords and the family that Ella’s older sister Wilhelmina had married into, the van Limburg Stirums. With that marriage Wilhelmina, known to the family as “Meisje” or “Girl,” had become Baroness van Heemstra, Countess van Limburg Stirum. The titles were as impressive as the manners and sense of noblesse oblige of the family, but the simple fact was that while many of them had a little money or some money, none of them had a lot of money.

  Lack of funds made Joseph Ruston unhappy, and he and Ella squabbled constantly. Then Joseph would hit the road to points unknown, and Ella would return home to Arnhem with the children and seek babysitting services from her father the baron and frail mother the baroness, who now resided in Villa Roestenburg, a cozy, fourteen-year-old, thatched-roof home in Oosterbeek on a tree-lined street called Pietersbergseweg.

  Adriaantje’s opa and oma practiced Calvinism devoutly, which meant prayers several times a day, steady Bible lessons, and more than two hours of church services on Sundays at the Oude Kerk, or Old Church, on the southern edge of the village, not far from the Rhine. And it really was old—built of Roman stone sometime around 1000 A.D. It fell to Adriaantje as the youngest in the house to say grace before each meal for what they were about to receive and again afterward for what they had just consumed.

  But days for Ella’s children also included plenty of time for play. Next door to Villa Roestenburg in a wooded setting sat an elegant hotel that bore the name Tafelberg. All around the Tafelberg Alex, Ian, and Adriaantje found trees to climb and woodlands to roam despite frequent scoldings from their mother. From the Tafelberg west to a grand resort hotel, the Hartenstein, lay woods, meadows, and a recreational facility, Sport Park Hartenstein, which were perfect haunts for marauding children.

  Little Adriaantje displayed liveliness only around her brothers. Otherwise, she was shy, sensitive, and terribly quiet. She didn’t like it when either parent traveled because it disrupted her comfort zone, which their home in Brussels represented. Her father seemed to her to be a lot of fun. He liked to be out of doors and taught her all about horses and how to ride. He also took her up in glider planes—gliding was a major fad of the 1930s, especially in Germany. “Audrey often spoke of the few memories she had of her father,” said her son Sean, “and she remembered vividly going gliding with him, the sound of the wind, the real sense of flying.”

  As the girl turned five, she became aware that her father was gone a lot, and that when he returned, both parents were often cross with each other. The arguing began to affect her and brought on bouts of anxiety and asthma. Then both parents began traveling, leaving Adriaantje and her brothers in Oosterbeek with Opa and Oma.

  During this period, Joseph and Ella spent increasing amounts of time in London, where both fell under the influence of Sir Oswald Mosley, former government minister and now head of the British Union of Fascists, the BUF. Hitler was all the rage in Germany for bringing back the failed German economy—Germany bolted to the economic forefront in a world gripped by depression from the crash of 1929. With Germany’s rebirth came a surge in nationalism fueled by Hitler’s cries of Aryan supremacy and hatred of anyone not “pure German.”

  English men and women heard Hitler’s strident message funneled through the mouth of Mosley as depression still gripped the island nation and no upward economic swings coincided with those in the Reich. Hitler saw the potential of the fascist way of life taking hold in England; he frankly admired and respected the British for their history and global empire. With his usual cunning the Führer encouraged Mosley, his ideology resonating with many in the British upper classes whose wealth had been hacked away by the economic turmoil of the decade.

  Rallies in Hyde Park drew crushing crowds in the thousands to see Mosley, clad in trademark black, deli
ver speeches about the potential of National Socialism to lead England out of the dark. He had long used the Great War as the dividing line that separated the overly polite “pre-war” politician from his brash “post-war” brothers. Now, Mosley railed against the use of cheap foreign labor and its crippling effect on the British economy, and he dared speak the name of the greatest threat of all: “It is the force which is served by the Conservative party, the Liberal party, and the Socialist party alike,” he said, “the force that has dominated Britain ever since the war…, the force of international Jewish finance!”

  Masses desperate for an answer to their economic suffering honored Mosley, the man in black, with the straight-armed Nazi salute.

  Among them were the daughters of Lord Redesdale (David Freeman-Mitford) and Lady Redesdale (Sydney Bowles). Most of the six Mitford girls of Swinbrook House northwest of London became lipstick Nazis, which was quite in vogue for the social set in ’34 and ’35. Tagging along was their society pal known somewhat disdainfully as “Heemstra.” The most glamorous Mitford sister, Diana, took the equally glamorous Nazi Mosley as a lover and then married him. The youngest Mitford, rebellious teenager Unity, headed for Munich and began stalking the Führer himself.

  Joseph and Ella were in hip deep with the Mitfords and enthralled with Mosley, then with Hitler, and especially with the concept of Nazism. Ella, from her perspective as a continental baroness living in Belgium, penned a short essay on the joys of Nazism for the BUF newspaper, The Blackshirt. Mosley was so appreciative that he invited Ella and her husband on a BUF junket to observe the Führer and tour Germany. Accordingly, the stay of Adriaantje and her brothers at Villa Roestenburg in Oosterbeek was extended for another month.

  When the touring British fascists arrived in Munich, they discovered that young Unity Mitford had earned Hitler’s attention at his favorite restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria. His security people had learned that she was British and an aristocrat—a social class that Hitler coveted—and he invited her to his table. By spring, Unity had gained firm enough footing with her crush the Führer to grant access to the Mitford crowd—including Ella and Joseph—and all shook hands with the most sought-after man in the world; he would later become TIME’s Man of the Year for 1938.