Advertisement

Audrey Hepburn’s son is well aware of the “more than a thousand books” already written about his mother, including his own “spiritual biography” penned shortly after she died in 1993. But Sean Hepburn Ferrer wants this intimate behind-the-scenes account to be the top-of-the-pile benchmark that will rub out the misinformation of other biographers’ scribblings – she wasn’t besties with Marilyn Monroe, nor anorexic, nor married three times!

It’s dubbed “authorised”, but by his own admission, film star and humanitarian Audrey Hepburn never wanted to write or sanction a memoir. She said such a thing would be “preposterous … the world needed it like a hole in the head”. Reading between the lines, one suspects she would forgive her firstborn this “definitive examination” of the woman he calls his best friend.

Ferrer was the cherished child she ached for following devastating miscarriages and, now 66, he sees himself as guardian of her legacy. That the result is frequently gushing is not entirely surprising, but the author’s unique proximity to his subject offers golden nuggets never before revealed, and these give a passionate frisson to his compelling portrait of an icon widely recognised but regularly misunderstood.

The co-writer is former war correspondent Wendy Holden and, while Hepburn’s formative experiences of “fear, hunger and death” during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands where she lived during World War II are presented as a foundational drumbeat, the narrative feels more like a son’s eulogy than a journalistic investigation.

Advertisement

Chapter openings deliver a quote from Hepburn summarising turning points followed by screenplay directions, as if ripped from a script of the film star’s life. The authors’ note explains that the places and dialogue in these introductions are based on “memories, testimonies, letters and interviews”, but the device is off-putting, introducing unnecessary artifice to precious insights into his mother’s private feelings and experiences.

What we learn is fascinating and at times heartbreaking. Ferrer wants to show that Hepburn was so much more than a movie star and fashion muse and deliberately opens the book with her gruelling humanitarian work with UNICEF, a role that supplanted her acting and became much more important to her. She insisted on visiting war-torn and natural disaster zones around the world, the most punishing being her final trip to Somalia. There was “no place worse on Earth”, she said afterwards, having watched the weakest “snuffed out like candles”. It proved too much to bear.

Hepburn was born in Brussels, her mother the cold, judgmental Dutch Baroness Ella van Heemstra and her father Anglo-Irish playboy Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, who walked out on his wife and daughter when she was six years old. The little girl who idolised her dad was devastated, crying for days. Her mother was also destroyed, her hair turning white overnight. A terror of impending abandonment scarred Hepburn’s adult relationships. “When I fell in love and married, I lived in constant fear of being left,” she said. Ferrer surmises that the consequence was that his mother had a constant need to be loved and to love.

That her parents were both members of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and friends with Unity Mitford, the British aristocrat who infamously had a relationship with Adolf Hitler and introduced them to the dictator, was a source of intense shame to Hepburn later in life. Her mother found Hitler “magnetic and charming” and even wrote an article describing Nazi rule as “a splendid example to the white races of the world”.

Advertisement

Following her father’s desertion, they moved to the Netherlands to live with her mother’s family near Arnhem, and Hepburn had a spell of happiness hanging out with her half-brothers, a tomboy existence climbing trees.

But in 1935, Hepburn’s sense of rejection was repeated when her mother sent her to a village school in the Kent countryside to learn English and connect with her father’s heritage. The locals called her “the girl with the saucer eyes”. She forged an inner resilience but never really fitted in. Her passion became the weekly dance lessons given by a young ballerina in the village hall.

When Germany started its march across Europe, the baroness believed her daughter would be safer in the Netherlands and evacuated the now 10-year-old from England. It was a terrible decision.

German tanks rolled into the Netherlands and five years of terror began, with Hepburn suffering near-fatal malnutrition and her uncle being executed. Ferrer says these horrific experiences gave his mother survivor’s guilt and “an excess of gratitude”. The night before the invasion, she had met her idol Margot Fonteyn performing in a theatre in Arnhem. Hepburn was awe-struck as she presented the dancer with a bouquet of tulips and declared she intended to be a prima ballerina too. She continued dancing behind closed doors throughout the war. “There is probably nothing in the world as determined as a child with a dream,” she said, “and I wanted to dance more than I feared the Germans.”

Advertisement

Ultimately, she didn’t make the grade and instead hoofed it as a chorus girl. Her segue into Hollywood was the result of a lucky screen test with William Wyler, who was looking for an ingenue to play opposite Gregory Peck in a new film called Roman Holiday.

Hepburn always said she couldn’t act, but her screen presence proved otherwise and stardom came quickly. Her praised poise was, Ferrer discovered, actually the result of a piece of shrapnel lodged in her neck in a wartime skirmish she never discussed. Hepburn’s fashion sense though was innate, and when she met couture designer Hubert de Givenchy, a style love affair began. Hepburn says they would have married if he hadn’t been gay.

Above all, she wanted to be a mother, and that proved much more difficult. Hepburn eventually had two sons from two failed marriages. Ferrer struggled with whether he should reveal the compulsive infidelity of his stepfather, psychiatrist Andrea Dotti. His mother would certainly not have shared it, but this betrayal is crucial to her story.

The most painful chapter is surely the last, with Hepburn’s tragic death at 63 from incurable cancer. A light went out. In Intimate Audrey, it is reignited.

Advertisement

Intimate Audrey: The Authorised Biography by Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Wendy Holden is published by HarperCollins ($35).

What else is happening in the book world?

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

License this article

More:

AdvertisementAdvertisement