Hepburn Audrey - Living like Audrey: life lessons from the fairest lady of all

VICTORIA LOUSTALOT was born in California and lives in New York. She earned her BA as well as her MFA from Columbia University. Living Like Audrey is her second book of nonfiction. Her first is the memoir This Is How You Say Goodbye.

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Copyright 2017 by Victoria Loustalot

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For my grandmother, because she was born just 366 days after Audrey and because, if they had ever had the chance to meet, they would have understood each other.

When I took on the task of writing about Audrey Hepburn, one of the first things I did was start talking about it. Everyone, even men, had the same reaction. It didnt matter where I was, either. It happened first in a park in Brooklyn; later at a restaurant in Los Angeles; then at the front desk of a hotel in Amsterdam; and eventually inside one of those office complexes in Manhattan that are enormous but feel claustrophobic.

At the first mention of Audreys name, somebody would get a spark in their eye and pipe up, Oh, I love Audrey! This would be followed by another somebody expressing their own bubbly tidbit of approval and enthusiasm, and by then all of the eyes in the group would be ablaze. Id respond by offering a brief summary of Audreys story, working in at some point, casually, that she wasnt an American, not by birth, not by blood, not even by residence.

This fact would inevitably lead to the second recurring reaction. People would look surprised, but only one person would say what the rest were thinking: She wasnt? And every time, I could practically hear the thoughts bobbling among the group: But she was such a Hollywood star. She didnt have an accent

Well, she was an actress.

More than a few of our friends across the pond in Britain have fallen for their own version of this phenomenon. Of course she wasnt American. She was British, several have said to me, not once hesitating to assert what they were certain was her obvious nationality. In a technically legal, stuffy sense, they werent exactly wrong. Still, the Belgians might beg to differ, and they have a strong case.

Because it was in Brussels that Audrey was born on May 4, 1929. Her mother was a Dutch baroness from Arnhem, and her father was a professional neer-do-well from the Czech Republic. It was actually Audreys paternal grandfather, and he alone, who was born in London. According to British law, however, this generational link, even leapfrogging as it had from grandfather to granddaughter, was sufficient to make Audrey herself English. Who would have thought the British would be so lenient about, well, anything, but especially citizenship? It is also true that, before World War II, Audrey attended boarding school in England and that she did use a British passport for most of her adult travels.

So while the Belgians still have the most legitimate claim to Audreys patrimony, the Brits may also lay claim rightly enough to a slice of her heritage. But, then, so, too, may the Dutch. For not only was Audreys mother Dutch, but when the war did come, it was Audreys father, already largely absent from her life, who arrived at her English boarding school and rushed her onto one of the last orange planes, on which he left the ten-year-old to fly by herself to Holland. It is hard to imagine that moment as anything other than some kind of familial version of Casablancas final, devastating scene.

It would be twenty years before Audrey saw her father again. Not that the passage of decades changed much. Their reunion was undoubtedly many things, but, by all accounts from those who were present or were told about it in intimacy and confidence not long after, it was most essentially lonely. The adjective may strike some as unexpected in this context, perhaps, but it is unlikely to have surprised Audrey herself. By that time in her life, she knew something of F. Scott Fitzgeralds meaning when he wrote, Things are sweeter when theyre lost. I know because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted, and when I got it, it turned to dust in my hand.

Audrey spent the rest of the war with her mother in and around Arnhem. They lived under the German occupation of the Netherlands, experiencing firsthand the harrowing consequences of the failed Allied maneuver Operation Market Garden in September 1944, as well as the Hongerwinter (Hunger winter), or Dutch famine, which followed at the end of 1944 and into 1945. During the last year of the war, like many families, Audrey and her mother lived mostly off of tulips, which they ground into flour to make something resembling bread.

By the time Allied troops liberated the Netherlands in May of 1945, Audrey was severely malnourished, suffering from anemia, edema, and respiratory problems. She had very nearly died during the war and understood its repercussions in ways none of her civilian peers in America could.

And yet, that has not prevented Americans from their persistence in trying to claim Audrey for their own as much as Europeans doperhaps, unsurprisingly, even more so. It doesnt matter that she didnt set foot on United States soil until the French told her to, which is exactly what happened when the eminent writer Colette spotted Audrey on a beach in France and demanded she be cast as Gigi in the forthcoming theatrical premiere of the eponymously titled Gigi on Broadway.

That New York play is what led to Audreys Hollywood screen test and her subsequent casting in Roman Holiday. Never mind that the role sent her right back to Europe and to Italy, where filming took place on location throughout Rome. Never mind, because as soon as the movie opened stateside, Audrey was a genuine star. Within months Hollywood would go on to award the twenty-four-year-old starlet the best actress Oscar for her turn as the royal Princess Ann, cementing her status as Hollywood royalty.

It was an award that everyone agreed she deserved, no one more so than her leading man in the film, Gregory Peck. She was the most extraordinary, natural actress, but not even so much an actress as a person of great, great quality, great depth, great intelligence, great humor, a wonderful, wonderful lady. I treasure in my recollections of my career those six months that we spent in Rome. Probably the happiest experience that I had making movies, Peck would tell a reporter many decades later, near the end of his life. And such praise from an esteemed actor who you might say was nothing short of the male Audrey Hepburn, for who is more gracious and more lovely than Gregory Peck? Only Audrey.