In 1959 world-famous movie star Audrey Hepburn was six years removed from her Best Actress Academy Award for Roman Holiday and five years distant from a Tony Award earned for Ondine on Broadway. She had recently broken her back in a fall from a horse while making the western Unforgiven. She earned half a million a picture these days, and her career survived even poorly received films like War and Peace and Green Mansions—the latter directed by her husband since 1954, actor Mel Ferrer. The world saw the quiet, reserved Hepburn as an oddity. She lacked the curves and overt sex appeal of Marilyn Monroe, now the hottest star in movies. A debate raged as to whether Hepburn was beautiful or ugly, sexy or boyish. With a tall frame and twenty-two-inch waist, Audrey Hepburn had already gained a reputation as a clothes horse and her designer of choice was Hubert de Givenchy, but she didn’t seek glamour or the spotlight. It found her despite serious efforts at avoidance. She longed for a quiet home life, wanted children, and didn’t like to party. She rarely provided juicy quotes for gossip columns. Words often used to describe her personality were “distant” and “aloof.”
Eleanor Harris, a writer and minor celebrity in Hollywood at the time, penned an article for Good Housekeeping about Audrey Hepburn just as prints of her new film, The Nun’s Story, circulated to theaters around the United States. The forty-seven-year-old Harris was known for writing the original story that became the 1948 Cary Grant film Every Girl Should Be Married, as well as a few other film and stage properties. Now, in the summer of 1959, she used her inside-Hollywood connections to put Audrey Hepburn into the crosshairs.
The resulting article accused Hepburn of pretending she was a real-life princess like the one she had played in Roman Holiday. Hepburn was, according to Harris, a synthetic personality adept at portraying a long-suffering soul. She wasn’t really too good to be true; she was just pretending she was, according to the author.
Examples abounded in Harris’s piece. When Audrey convalesced from a broken back, she reclined in a white room with white appointments in a white bed. She wore a white dressing gown and a white ribbon in her hair. The nurse who tended Audrey said, “She refused all narcotics and sedatives, and despite her pain she never once complained. As a matter of fact, I never even saw her become irritated. She seemed more interested in other people’s problems than in her own.”
Another Harris example of Hepburn’s disingenuous self concerned the making of her latest picture: “For the six months of shooting The Nun’s Story,” wrote Harris, “she seemed to be playing the role of the selfless nun whether or not she was near a camera. ‘It’s that princess bit again—be a shining example to the populace,’ comments an acquaintance.” And, according to Harris, at one point Hepburn “was stranded for many hours in the broiling African sun without drinking water. When it arrived, she poured cupfuls for thirsty natives, leaving none for herself.”
A third example of Hepburn’s oddness from Harris: On location in Rome for the same picture, Hepburn developed kidney stones and suffered pain that literally knocked her out of bed. But she refused to bother director Fred Zinnemann and his wife after hours, even though they lodged a phone call away in the same hotel. “This makes it clear that Audrey, having chosen her noble role, plays it to the hilt, as any superb actress should,” wrote Harris’s poison pen. She noted “the intense way she [Hepburn] goes about making everything perfect—from her performances to her household, to her marriage, to her opinion of others, and to her own princess-like view of herself as she thinks others should see her.”
Harris noted with seeming disapproval that Hepburn and husband Mel Ferrer had never owned a home in their five years of marriage, instead renting in a variety of countries. “But I feel at home everywhere, never having had a permanent home in my life,” she quoted Audrey as saying. “And beside, we move our home with us, like snails.”
Harris said that “like an exiled member of royalty, she takes with her, wherever she goes, trunks packed with her own candelabra, flat silver, books, records, pictures.”
Harris also attacked the world-famous waist of Audrey Hepburn. “As with everything else in her life, her elegant, bone-thin figure is the result of harsh discipline. She always eats the same breakfast: two boiled eggs, one piece of seven-grain whole-wheat toast from a health-food store, and three or four cups of coffee laced with hot milk. Her lunch consists of cottage cheese and fruit salad or of yogurt with raw vegetables. For dinner she has meat and several cooked vegetables.”
In the world of Eleanor Harris, there was no room for a “too-good-to-be-true” creature like Audrey Hepburn. But Harris held out hope that someday Hepburn would “prove it by finally revealing herself to be like the rest of the human race, both good and bad.”
How simple for freelance writer Eleanor Harris. Bang out 2,500 words, snag a $500 paycheck, and move on. But for Audrey Hepburn, the sentence was life long, written in blood, half British and half Frisian. The too-good personality had been pounded into her, not only by Mother but by merciless dance instructors, by ruthless German authorities, and by bombs manufactured in three countries. The mastery of self had been her means of survival in times that were blacker than black, when people she knew were dragged off, never to return, and when the food ran out and there was next to nothing to eat for weeks and months on end. No, there was never anyone quite like Audrey Hepburn, and there’s no way of understating how wrong Harris had gotten her story. In fact, to meet Hepburn was to be in the presence of honesty, integrity, and genuineness. To see what remained after the war. All that was forged in the war. She was a woman who had survived. Yes, she carried secrets, and their burden was great. If a reporter strayed too close to any of these secrets, she would say, “I don’t want to talk about that.” But she would never dream of lying to you about anything. She had been brought up better than that.
Just fifteen years earlier she had ridden out the battle for “a bridge too far” and helped civilian victims deal with its aftermath. She would never go into detail about what she had seen—how much blood she had washed off her hands, how many souls in misery she had comforted; these were among the things she didn’t want to talk about. While Eleanor Harris lived in the safety of the United States and wrote screenplays of adventure, the Dutch girl was experiencing adventures that were far too real. After the death of the baroness, Audrey opened up about the trials of being her mother’s daughter: “I was given an outlook on life by my mother, a lady of very strict Victorian standards,” said Hepburn. “It was frowned upon to bother others with your feelings. It was frowned upon not to think of others first. It was frowned upon not to be disciplined.”
In October 1944 she brought fifteen years of her mother’s training to bear in the hospital of Velp as she started down a path that would have at its end, forty-four years later, the role of UNICEF ambassador.