Dutch Girl Read online

  Her opa enjoyed his life in the rented rooms of the castle with its little lake, broad lawns, and wooded nature trails. As a boy, Joop Onnekink lived near the castle and visited Zijpendaal with his father, a police detective in Arnhem. “My father was a stamp collector,” said Joop, “and so was the baron. He was a very nice man, very friendly and outgoing.” Decades later Audrey would still remember her grandfather’s patience and sense of humor in the darkest times.

  The castle the baron lived in was a perfect getaway for the type of person Adriaantje was becoming. As she put it, “I had a passion for the outdoors, for trees, for birds and flowers.” She would retreat to watch the ducks, geese, and herds of deer. Then there were the cats, two dozen of them, belonging to the site manager, Mevrouw Mia Schulte van Zegwaart, nicknamed “Katten mei.”

  It was here at de Zijp in 1941, a golden time for the family despite the war, that Ian and Adriaantje grew close to Otto and Meisje, the count and countess, two warm, positive people who were fully willing to shower their niece and nephew with the affection that was so foreign to Ella. And how Adriaantje loved Opa, a grand, elegant gentleman whose family tree covered a wall in the entrance to his rooms. Both Ian and Adriaantje looked to Opa and Otto as father figures and cherished their relationships with each. Baron van Heemstra was a fixture on the lawns at de Zijp in his straw hat, cigar gripped in his teeth, as he held court with his family on picnic Sundays. Adriaantje would always love the warmth and cuddles of Tante Meisje and the warm smile and intelligent conversation of Oom Otto. Meisje and Otto were among the most renowned contract bridge players in Arnhem, and it was inevitable that Adriaantje and Ian must learn the card game with all its intricate strategy.

  Travel remained a possibility in 1941, and the family went on holiday to the beach at Noordwijk, a resort town just north of Rotterdam. These were grand times, and although Alex was in hiding, he showed up frequently to see his girl, Miepje, in Oosterbeek, the next town over from Arnhem, and Adriaantje’s heroic big brother would stop by at the castle. For 1941 at least, there were peace and closeness for the van Heemstras at Zijpendaal.

  Part II:

  Long Live Oranje!

  7

  Pencil Scratches

  West London

  30 October 1950

  Like many if not most film projects, this one had taken years to come to fruition. In fact, the outbreak of war in 1940 Britain had spawned Secret People, which was to be a tale of the dangers of information falling into the hands of the enemy as a consequence of loose talk. Audrey was eleven at the time bombs first fell on London and had recently moved to the Netherlands.

  A full script treatment for Secret People didn’t emerge until after the war in 1946. By then it was still a dark tragedy that had mutated and now concerned a woman named Maria, who has a daughter named Nora. Their family had fled a totalitarian regime to pre-war London. There Maria meets an old comrade from her days in the Resistance, a handsome man with whom she had had an affair. He convinces her to deliver a bomb to another member of the Resistance—the bomb will be used to kill a leader of the totalitarian regime who is visiting London. The plan backfires and the bomb kills a waitress at a restaurant.

  During the next four years the story treatment became a script and the plot was tweaked and tweaked again. Nora became Maria’s sister and a dancer, specifically a teenage ballerina. In the same four years Audrey, now twenty-one, had become a sort of actress in front of the camera. In fact, she had just completed a bit part: one scene and a single line with Alec Guinness on the Ealing Studios production, The Lavender Hill Mob. It had been the latest role in the progression from walk-ons with no lines at all to a line here and there, and Audrey still didn’t believe in this acting thing. She had been making a living as a dancer, but there was money in the moving pictures too, much easier money than dancing fifteen or twenty shows a week, and she needed all the money she could get to pay her share of the bills because London wasn’t the cheapest place to reside. Her mother had been working like crazy at any jobs she could get as well—housekeeper, seamstress, florist, and whatever else came along.

  Audrey took one last drag on her cigarette to calm jangled nerves and walked inside the Ealing Studios front office in West London. The building looked more like somebody’s modest home than a center of British film production. Inside she met director Thorold Dickinson and his creative team. It had been Dickinson who first conceived of Secret People way back when.

  Right away Audrey sensed she was wasting her time by what she could see in the faces of the people as she shook their hands. She was too tall—yet again too tall—and to make it worse, she happened to be wearing three-inch heels that must have made her look gargantuan. She completed her reading and walked back out into the daylight and did her best to put Secret People behind her.

  One hundred fifteen days later, on 22 February 1951, the phone rang, Ealing calling. Could Miss Hepburn come in the following day for a second test as Nora in what was now being called The Secret People? She could? Excellent. Script pages would be delivered. After nearly four months, they wanted her back to test for the same part.

  The next afternoon, a Thursday, Audrey repeated the practice, one last drag on her cigarette before walking into the cozy Ealing front office in West London. She didn’t know that she had been the first choice all along; she had been correct in what she had sensed, that she was too tall when compared with the men who had already been cast. That had been the debit against her. But the “Nora” seen the previous day had been deemed unsuitable in the audition because her eyes were too expressive and showed too much worldly experience. The production team had been haunted by the young Hepburn girl and looked at her head shot again; they saw big brown eyes that seemed to reveal only pure innocence. So Audrey was back, wearing flats this time, and now noticed the crude pencil scratches on the painted plaster wall of the office where every actor and actress had been measured for height—scrawled lines and names seemingly done in anger. It was the lesson the team learned the moment she had walked out almost four months earlier: Measure everyone’s height against that of the leading men.

  Recently, the team had been testing potential Noras from the ranks of the London corps de ballet only to learn the dancers weren’t actresses; the Nora part was big and important, requiring not only acting skill but ballet as well. Question was, could this dancer called Audrey Hepburn possibly be an actress? This girl had managed only a few lines in a few pictures and was never a classical stage actress at all.

  The part of Nora had evolved since the previous October, and Dickinson, the director, ran through it with a nervous Audrey: Nora is the younger sister of the lead, Maria. She must perform two ballet sequences before the camera, and she’s key to many scenes in the picture—many dramatic scenes, including one where she holds the dying Maria in her arms.

  Audrey had to wonder if this was a dream—might she really be dancing ballet before cameras? Or a nightmare—she had no idea what to do as a dramatic actress and the idea of it terrified her.

  She read the chosen scene with a production assistant. All she could do was feel her way through it and act and react on instinct. As a witness in the room that day noted, “After the first run-through, people start eyeing each other meaningfully; she has the quality all right. After another rehearsal it seems almost a waste of time to shoot the test.”

  Audrey walked out of Ealing again with no commitment from them, but three days later the official call came: Audrey had been cast as Nora. It was her first featured part in a motion picture. One week later she reported to a London church for rehearsal of a pivotal ballet sequence. For the first time in a while she was back on a ballet stage for a performance. It was beyond heaven working with the choreographer and other dancers, as around them the director of photography and technical crew assessed camera setups and lighting.

  Since the end of the war she had never stopped working. Ballet lessons, dancing in chorus lines, two shows a night, night after night, mode
ling for the still camera, bits on television, bits in the movies. She took anything, relentlessly, never saying no. Physical activity kept the mind too busy to think about the war and all that had happened. Now she had a big important screenplay to learn, and ballets to perform onscreen. All of it made the past bearable, just so long as she didn’t have too many quiet moments alone to think.

  8

  Unacceptable

  Audrey Hepburn on the war: “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world—anything that happens to you is valuable.”

  As years go, 1941 wasn’t so bad for the van Heemstras. Ella’s social calendar was full at all times with the Pander job and various cultural activities. Audrey was going to both public school and dance school and sometimes received rides from Uncle Otto, who commuted every day in his Renault from the castle on the highlands above Arnhem down to the Paleis van Justitie in Arnhem Centraal by the large Market Square, a short two blocks from the music school. There he served as a substituut-officier—an assistant public prosecutor working on a variety of criminal cases. In April 1939 he handled the case of a man who admitted to having six or seven drinks before getting behind the wheel and striking a woman riding a bicycle and killing her. The defendant received four months in prison. In August it was a case in which a twenty-three-year-old woman living at home had given birth to twins in secret. One was stillborn and she strangled the other, with the bodies later found floating in the Korne River. Otto’s prosecution resulted in the mother with obvious mental problems sentenced to one year in prison. In September he charged three scammers for embezzling more than 25,000 gulden from an elderly woman. Otto earned convictions of one year, a year and a half, and two-and-a-half years in jail for the defendants. Usually, he showed lenience if there was genuine remorse and especially if rehabilitation was possible, but he treated these three more harshly than either the drunk driver or the killer mother.

  By February 1941 the war was encroaching on his work. Adjudicating under Nazi laws, Otto was forced to prosecute a twenty-eight-year-old shopkeeper in Arnhem for listening to Radio Oranje, the “forbidden channel,” in his rooms. The shopkeeper claimed that he listened to music and music only on this channel, but the Green Police heard Radio Oranje and entered the apartment above his shop to find him lying on the bed while a political broadcast played. The shopkeeper said he was asleep at the time. Otto now found himself in a tough spot. He was no longer representing true justice in the Netherlands; he was representing the occupier’s twisted version of the law. The offender received a sentence of ten months in jail.

  Then came the case that changed everything. In June a man was arrested for singing a forbidden song in public:

  At the corner of the street

  Is an NSB member

  It’s not a person, it’s not an animal

  But a Pharisee.

  The attorney general of Arnhem, Wilhelmus de Rijke, insisted that Otto prosecute the offender. Otto continued to refuse, saying that no member of the NSB could possibly be offended by a rhyme that was “almost senseless.” He knew his Bible—the reference to Pharisees as a sect of purists was obscure, even to him. But de Rijke found the usage “reviling and hateful.”

  Soon the tempest in a teapot involved J.J. Schrieke, Secretary-General of the Ministry of Safety and Justice in the Nazi Netherlands, and Otto continued to hold firm through a series of increasingly nasty letters back and forth.

  As drama played out across the postal system, the Germans were commandeering buildings for military or administrative use, nearly every large structure in town. They took over the Tamboersbosje school and displaced all the students, including Adriaantje, and the worry was, would the Muziekschool be next, and would the new dance student see her dreams dashed after only a few months? Actually, no, because the director of the school, Douwe Draaisma, had taken steps to join the NSB, the Dutch Nazi Party, for a number of practical reasons: He sought to maintain control over his own institution, keep his roster of students intact since his male dancers might easily have been shipped off to the German army or to labor camps, and protect his Dutch (and secretly) Jewish wife, Winja Marova. When Draaisma joined the NSB, all threats were removed, at least for the time being.

  On 4 May 1941, Adriaantje turned twelve. Alex, who was still in hiding, was getting serious with Miepje Monné, the daughter of a veterinarian in Oosterbeek, and bringing her to the apartment for visits with the family. It was a time when Ella was openly friendly with the occupiers. “Ella was very English,” said Miepje, “but also pro-German. That was generally known. She also dealt a lot with a German general,” meaning Oestreich of the Dutch Nazis.

  As spring gave way to summer and it seemed that German occupation might be bearable for the Dutch after all, a military decision Hitler made would begin a downward spiral for all of Europe. On 22 June the German army launched Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union. Three army groups struck east in an effort to gain territory and resources and to annihilate the Slavs and any Jews they found. It was far from their policy toward the Dutch, who were Aryans with many admirable qualities. The Nazi high command believed that those in Eastern Europe deserved only to die.

  All three invading German army groups made varying degrees of progress, and mile after mile of Soviet territory became a part of the Third Reich. But the hundreds of thousands of German soldiers making the march into Soviet territory needed food, clothing, and arms, which sooner or later would mean increasing hardship for those under occupation as resources flowed out of the country for military use. In the meantime through June and July, the news of conquest reaching Arnhem was happy indeed, putting the occupiers in a marvelous mood.

  Such a mood held Adriaantje captive as well, if for a completely different reason. The shy and withdrawn child who disappeared into the wallpaper in any social situation had transformed under the influence of dance and now sought only to express herself. She would do so for the first time publicly in an 18 July performance with Marova’s other dance students in a program at the German-controlled Wehrmachtheim, the grand old concert hall just up the boulevard from the Schouwburg in Arnhem. Until recently this venue for fine music and dance had been called the Musis Sacrum and was the home of the Arnhem Symphony Orchestra. Now the German army had commandeered the concert hall to hold meetings and entertain soldiers.

  Yes, Adriaantje was evolving and to such a degree that Marova now had trouble controlling her. The novice insisted she would dance “Aese’s Death” from Peer Gynt—the dying movements of an old woman. Marova managed to redirect her pupil to a solo from Prussian composer Moritz Moszkowski’s Serenade and also compromised by letting her choreograph some of her movements. But this wasn’t the only bit of “attitude” facing Marova. “She was a curious child. With great insistence, she wanted me to call her Adriaantje,” said Marova, because she thought it sounded more like the name of a ballerina. “So it was Adriaantje who performed in Musis, on July 18, 1941.” However, in the program she would carry a different name, and not Edda. It seems that by this time, Ella felt so secure in her relationships with the ruling Nazi authorities, including her beau, Herr Oestreich, that she no longer felt the need to hide her daughter behind the Dutch-sounding Edda. The young dancer was now proclaimed to be, and would remain through the war, a very English-sounding Audrey Hepburn-Ruston.

  With boundless pride, Ella watched the glowing twelve year old step into the bright lights, dance to Moszkowski, and earn applause and even cheers for the first time. Something inside Adriaantje had snapped on, some inner mechanism that allowed her to project outward to the world through dance as she never had in any other way, at any other time. On a stage, for some reason, the shyness fell away, and she was temporarily released from the shackles of a wounded, awkward child. Marova admitted years later to being on the fence about Audrey—she had gotten such a late start in dance, didn’t have a classic dancer’s body, and was proving to be headstrong. “But when I saw her, and the reactions of the audience, then I knew: She
has it; she has the spark; she has the secret. The people were delighted.”

  The next day, cultural reporter Louis Couturier of the Arnhemsche Courant stated, “Although many were involved in developing this evening of dance, we want to mention only the name of Audrey Hepburn-Ruston, who, although only twelve, gave a unique performance.” The review shows the remarkable impression Audrey had made, considering that she had been training with Marova for a matter of months and not years. But Ella was likely working behind the scenes to assure the best possible coverage for her daughter, as when Couturier noted that the dancer had arranged “her own choreography”—something for which both Ella and Audrey were rightfully proud.

  Of Audrey’s situation Marova said, “Her mother was very dominant—a real ballet mother, and the other girls didn’t like it. They were also jealous, because Audrey was always the one that was mentioned.”

  Ella had become a powerhouse in local cultural affairs. As patroness of the Arnhem String Quartet, she next organized a musical evening to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the death of Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who succumbed at just thirty-five years of age. The music of Salzburg-born Mozart was in line with the German regime’s use of culture to advertise Aryan superiority, and Ella spent two full months planning the event, which was to be held at the Schouwburg on Tuesday, 11 November 1941.

  But all was not well on the home front. By this time, all Dutch political parties other than the Nazi party had been abolished. Then, in November, Audrey’s Uncle Otto received an official letter from Secretary-General of Justice Schrieke, who had been the first member of the Dutch Nazi party, the NSB, to enter the Department of Justice after being appointed by Seyss-Inquart for his “open-mindedness” to the occupation. In his new position, Schrieke ordered court officials in the provinces of the Netherlands to draw up a list of Dutch who were known to oppose the Reich. Otto had tried to work with the new regime, but Schrieke’s order to “name names” was unconscionable. Under-Prosecutor van Limburg Stirum refused to cooperate and now, three months later, held a letter that read: “The above-mentioned person rejected in a letter written to his superior, [Arnhem] Attorney-General Rijke, and in an inappropriate form, the drawing up of a list for the prosecution of those called politically dissident as traitors to the country. He has also denied his superior Attorney-General Rijke the right to order him to loyal cooperation. In a summary letter addressed to him on 1 September 1941, he [van Limburg Stirum] expressly reiterated in a condensed form what he said in his previous letter. As a result, he is no longer acceptable for the post of public prosecutor. The General Commissioner for Administration and Justice has therefore pronounced the immediate dismissal of the above from his post as Under-Prosecutor of the Arnhem District Court.”